Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Amkulyah’s face was gaunt, the skin tight on the delicate bones of his skull. Everything about him was slender, fragile-seeming, yet he would be deceptively strong beneath the surface, built to balance all the competing tensions of flight. His eyes were huge, the nose and slash of a mouth almost an afterthought, a thumbprint-looking tattoo on his chin standing in for the beard he couldn’t yet grow. He wore a backless shift, tied at the neck and loose on his thin frame. Only a leather circlet with a gold disc at his brow marked him out as anything more than another Aethani refugee.

  “Your Highness,” Celestaine started, but he waved the title away, staring at her.

  “You’re right. Obviously we should meet here to avoid untoward attention.” His deadpan gaze took in the taproom, half of which was still staring at her, most especially the furiously twanging minstrel.

  A very few of the Aethani lit out the moment the Kinslayer’s armies appeared at the border, but the war had been young, then. Nobody had realised who the Kinslayer was, and Aethan had been wealthy, layered with centuries of tradition. The winged people had been weighed down by all that they didn’t want to leave behind. And probably they had told each other, It can’t be that bad, like so many others back then. They had gone to the Kinslayer and he had chained them, and he had cut off their wings, each and every one. He had evacuated the entire nation of them, men, women and children, from their beautiful lofty towns. He burned everything they had ever built or made and he had put them—a people of the sky with a horror of close spaces—into the Dorhambri mine. The Aethani still existed, those that had survived the years of claustrophobia and backbreaking work, but only in camps. They had lost their culture and they had lost the sky.

  Celestaine had heard a very learned man claim that using the Aethani as slave miners had set back the Kinslayer’s invasion plans by six months, because they were so very poorly suited to it. That was what had set her on this course, to somehow restore what had been taken from them. The scourging of Aethan had not been for power or for pragmatism, but pure spite.

  Meeting Amkulyah’s doubting gaze, she shrugged off all the attention from below. “I pledged my help, and you have it. What can be done will be done, Your Highness.”

  Somewhere within his huge round eyes he flinched. Highness of what, exactly? She saw just how unimpressed he was by ‘What can be done…’ too. Still, he’s here. He came. Her next words were cut short as a hollering started up outside, which she took for the usual sort of brawling a place like this new Bladno must breed. A moment later, though, a harsh ululating call went up, setting everyone on their feet and most of them with weapons to hand. Amkulyah’s scarred flight limbs clenched as though he had a dying spider grafted to his back. Everyone knew that call, the battle-hymn of the Kinslayer’s most feared vanguard. For a moment, the war was still on and they were still losing it.

  Except Celestaine knew exactly what must be going on, and was vaulting down the stairs, elbowing gawkers out of the way. She had been too long. Her friends of the road had got bored.

  Chapter Two

  NEDLAM AND HENO, then, out in the dirt streets of the Bladno camp beneath the arching ribs of Vermarod. They had their hoods and scarves down, not that the garments served to hide what they were. A crowd was already gathering: swords, clubs, spears, bows. Neither of them looked daunted. Nedlam was even looking forward to it, from her expression. Celestaine was already shouting, though, hoping her fame would suffice to stop the arrows flying. She fought through the crowd, and when they saw who she was they let her pass, thinking she was going to rid them of this new menace. Right as she stumbled into the open, Heno thrust a hand up and conjured a ball of cold white fire. The crowd rippled back, leaving Celestaine facing the pair of them, because everyone there had seen what that fire did when it burned.

  For a second, she was looking at the two just like the others, because she had fought a war for ten long years and, for most of it, she had been looking into faces just like these.

  They were Yorughan, both of them. The Kinslayer had a lot of minions, whole twisted races he had bred beneath the earth while he plotted his timely revenge. Every soldier of the free world was well acquainted with them: the creepy, sneaky ones; the clever trap-makers; the great monsters. But the Yorughan were the ones to fear, the battlefield elites, stronger even than the Oerni or the Frostclaw Clans, and with all the initiative and cunning of humanity. They were the line-breakers, the wall-takers, unstoppable warriors and battle magi, and there were two of them standing right there as though all the Kinslayer’s armies were at their back.

  It was an effort to do the right thing then. The hatred of every other human and Oerni and everyone else was stinking in the air, her hand was on her sword hilt, and she could have taken the path of least resistance. But if there was one thing Celestaine never did, it was make it easy on herself.

  “They’re mine!” she shouted into that expectant hush—a hush that expected nothing from her except heroic butchery. And then, because she didn’t like the connotations, and because she was infinitely pedantic when it came to herself, “With me. They’re with me.” She took a deep breath, ordering her words. “They came here with me. They’re not enemies. The war’s over.”

  She looked from face to face. Nobody there believed the war was over, not in the heat of the moment, with two Yorughan in front of them. Looking at her companions of the road, Celestaine could see the problem.

  Hard to look at either of them without their first meeting coming to mind. She’d been on that final desperate mission with the others—all the Slayers, whose names were in everyone‘s songs now. The armies of the free world had been outside the walls of Nydarrow and dying like flies to hold the Kinslayer’s notice—because if he loved any one thing, it was seeing the mortal races fall before his hordes. They had fought and died, and died more than they fought, mostly, and she and the others had been inside the walls of his fortress trying to get to him. It had taken a demigod to get them in, and it had used the last of their luck as well: Celestaine and Lathenry had been cut off from the others and caught, and that had been it.

  Except, while she had been manacled to the slab and awaiting the Kinslayer’s personal pleasure, in had come a couple of monstrous figures. She’d thought they were her torturers, but then they’d started talking like reasonable people. Or at least Heno had done the talking; Nedlam had just taken up half the room and picked her teeth.

  They’d not looked like reasonable people. In the torture chamber, they had looked the most ferocious monsters Celestaine had ever seen—she who had slain Vermarod the Invincible. Their faces had been painted with human blood, Heno’s in delicate spiralling patterns and Nedlam’s just splashed all over. The spatter-patterns across Ned’s heavy iron pauldrons had stuck indelibly in Celestaine’s mind, up to and including the tiny hand-print smeared down her breastplate, because when the Yorughan painted themselves up for war, they took the blood hot and fresh from the source.

  The Kinslayer’s minions had been slaves to his will, everyone knew it. Let any of them fail him and he could crush them, drive them berserk, force them to fight to the last scrap of flesh. And most of all, he denied them the chance to look in the mirror and see that they were slaves. Except Heno had, and he hadn’t liked it. He was ready to stick the knife in his master’s divine arse, and he was offering a deal. And so Celestaine and her companion had gone free, rejoined their comrades and been led to where they had needed to go, to earn their place in all those tedious drinking songs. Treachery had brought down the Kinslayer, and that was a truly poetic thing. Shame the songs never got round to mentioning it.

  Nedlam was the bigger of the two. At a few inches over eight feet, she might even be the biggest. She wore some of her old kit—a sleeveless hauberk of scaled red hide that fell to her knees was the most obvious piece of Kinslayer uniform she’d held on to—along with various odd pieces of human-sized plate strapped wherever they would fit about her huge frame. Her skin was blue-grey, veined with pa
le streaks like slate, and her dark, spiky hair always ended up in a lopsided coxcomb no matter what she did with it. Her tusks, twin curves of sharp ivory jutting from the corners of her mouth, were capped with silver. Sloped over her shoulder was an iron-studded club that weighed as much as a man.

  Ned was one thing—there had been plenty like her in the Kinslayer’s vanguard, even if most hadn’t been so big. Heno was the one everyone was goggling at; he wasn’t your regular Kinslayer elite. His hair was silver white, worn long to the shoulders. He had a beard he trimmed to a point and long moustaches—before she saw him, she hadn’t realised Yorughan even had facial hair, beyond a sandpaper stubble. He was a foot shorter than Nedlam, but his tusks were longer, curved upwards like a boar’s, one of them scrimshawed with intricate arabesques. He still wore the white-edged long coat of leathery hide that marked him as a Heart Taker blood magus, most feared of all the Yorughan. His order had been the slaughterers of the innocent, the salters of the earth, the conduits for the Kinslayer’s terrible power.

  “The war’s over,” Celestaine shouted at the crowd, waiting for that one arrow, that one veteran’s past that was too scarred to hold back. It would almost be a relief to discover her sainted name wasn’t actually a talisman of strength to the world. She would feel less responsible for everything.

  But the minstrel was there, of course, and the stableboy and plenty of others who knew her face—this was the Forinthi Marches, after all. She was the local girl done good. She saw them scowl and frown and mutter, but the weapons were grudgingly lowered.

  “Put that away,” she snarled at Heno from the corner of her mouth. He eyed her sidelong—that look of his that spoke of a desire to cause chaos just to see what came of it—but a flick of his fingers sent the orb of pale fire boiling into nothing.

  “They’re with me,” she told them all again. “They’re helping.” Not right at the moment they’re not. Helping would be staying out of sight. But what then? Would she keep them in a sack as she traipsed around the world? The whole point was that the Kinslayer was dead. It wasn’t as though all of his minions had just gone up in smoke.

  Some of them had, but not all of them. She felt her attention dragged up, and saw Amkulyah perched in the eyesocket window of the Skull Cup. Celestaine could practically see the Aethani prince’s faith in her waning.

  “Come on inside, then, since you’re here,” she growled at her companions, leading the way through the crowd. Not too effectively, it was true, as Heno was half again as broad as she was, and Nedlam broader still, but at least she was doing something.

  ‘Sceptical’ didn’t do Amkulyah’s expression justice, but he didn’t just bolt the moment the two Yorughan sat down at his table. Celestaine would put money on him having a knife out where they couldn’t see it, but he stared down the hulking pair with something approaching regal disdain. Celestaine had to look really close to see the fear behind it.

  “When you sent your message, you neglected to mention the sort of help you were hiring.”

  “I didn’t hire them,” Celestaine started. Simultaneously, Nedlam said, “We get paid now?” Her ferocious expression suggested she was about to murder a baby, and Amkulyah probably didn’t parse it as an easy-going smile. The Kinslayer had bred them well: there wasn’t much that showed on the average Yorughan’s face that wasn’t terrifying.

  Heno cleared his throat and splayed a hand over his chest, the universal indicator of slightly fake humility. “The noble Celestaine saved us from death in the fortress of the Kinslayer. We are bound by our warrior honour to serve and aid her in her quest.” He spoke well for a Yorughan. They’d both learned several of the free folk languages during the war, because most of the fortress garrison got interrogation duty every so often. Nedlam’s tusks made her sound jovially drunk, which must have enlightened the beatings she was expected to dole out. Heno talked round his precisely, the consonants clicking cleanly over the burr of his deep, rich voice.

  And Celestaine knew it was rubbish. The Yorughan didn’t have warrior honour. They weren’t like the Frostclaw, with a generations-long heritage of clan war. They had been bred efficiently to be war-monsters by the Kinslayer’s brutal hand. That such treatment had turned out creatures—people—like Heno and Nedlam was a testament to the limits to even His power.

  Amkulyah stared at them thoughtfully. Yorughan faces were long, with heavy jaws and buttressed brows. Their eyes were small and deep-set, their noses far too slight for their famous sense of smell, their mouths thin-lipped and dominated by the curving tines of their bestial tusks. Here were faces twisted by a divine hand to be incapable of fine expression, intended as masks for monsters equally incapable of finer feeling.

  Heno smiled. He had worked hard on that smile, practising it in mirrors and still water until it was almost urbane. Even so, Amkulyah would have been pitifully frail for a human, and any human was small before a Yorughan.

  But at last, Amkulyah said, “You said you could help.”

  “Help your people,” Celestaine agreed. “I said I wanted to try.” Did I say I actually could? Maybe I did. That was unwise. “I want to help. If I can bring some sort of succour to the Aethani, then I will. My sword is at your disposal.” She glanced down at it as she said it and swore, because the scabbard of reversed hide had finally given way, the impossibly keen edge naked to the air. She must have come perilously close to cutting someone’s leg off on the way back to him.

  “How?” Amkulyah asked, and then again, “How?” when he saw her distracted. “I thought you had some magic plan. You know wizards. You know Guardians.”

  Celestaine put her hands up defensively. “I do, and I’ll try all of them.” Those who’re still alive. Those who haven’t gone to ground where I’ll never find them. “And more. There’s all sorts of magic turning up, now the Kinslayer’s coffers got opened up.” And looted and scattered, but we’ll deal with that when we get to it. “There are holy relics, great artefacts, potions, grimoires—there’s a whole market in high-powered war surplus right now. Something will be able to help, Prince Amkulyah.” She almost said please, almost begged to be able to help. The sight of his butchered, spiky flight-limbs was like an awl jabbing into her.

  “Some of my people think we should just get on with it,” the Aethani said quietly, and at last his calm mask slipped and she saw how very young he was, how he too was crippled, not just by the lost wings but by a responsibility he could not discharge. “They say, nobody else has wings, or almost nobody. They say, we can do other things. And our children might learn to fly on their own, without us to teach them.” He paused, eyes on something they couldn’t see. “Or we’ll cut them too, to make them like us, because we can’t bear to see them drag those useless sheets of skin around behind them, and we can’t bear to see them do what we’ve lost.”

  “No…” Celestaine breathed.

  “I hear it. It’s like a cult, growing amongst them. Some of them say, the gods can’t have meant for us to fly. They say the Kinslayer’s hand was the gods’ will. It’s easier, that way, to think that it was all meant.”

  “But you don’t believe that,” she told him desperately.

  “I? No, not most of the time. But there are days…” He brought his hands up, and yes, there was the knife he had been holding as inadequate insurance against Yorughan treachery. Neither Heno nor Nedlam spared it a glance. “You want to help, Hero-Champion of the Forinthi, Slayer of the Slayer. I will go with you. I will do what I can to help you help my people. And if there is no help, then…” He made an odd gesture, the last fingers of each hand flicking up and away. Dust on the wind. The nightmarish clutch of his back echoed it. “No more ‘prince,’ though. We are brought low, so what use is ‘highness’ to us?” And to her horror he meant it, the play on words: the worst, most bitter joke she ever heard. “Amkulyah. Kul, if that is too much.”

  Then a girl was at the table, almost at Amkulyah’s ravaged shoulders to keep away from the Yorughan, but putting mugs down anyway.
“From a friend,” she whispered, jabbing a finger down into the lower taproom.

  Celestaine followed the digit, wondering if someone was about to try poisoning her companions; something more easily tried than succeeded at, in her experience. Their benefactor, or possibly murderer, was a hooded figure sitting alone at a shadowy table, a long white beard taking up most of what could be seen of his face and a long-stemmed pipe in his hand. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.

  Am I really going to say it? But she was already saying it as she stood. “Stay here. Look after him if anything happens.”

  Nedlam grimaced ferociously at her in what Celestaine knew to be mild exasperation. Heno tapped her arm.

  “Better to leave that here. We’ll watch it.” He nodded at her sword.

  “Good idea,” she admitted, and gingerly freed it from the unseamed wreck of the scabbard. Even placing it on the table with utmost care she shaved a slice off the wood. The Guardian named Wanderer had given her that blade. It would cut through metal and magic and anything else she had tried without slowing much. Certainly there was a slot somewhere above them in Vermarod’s brainpan to demonstrate just how potent it was. Which meant actually carrying it anywhere was a logistical challenge.