Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then she saw the other Heart Taker pushing forwards, the second apprentice. He had a spitting ball of white fire in his hands, already flying at her even as she saw. She braced, but though it left a skin of rime across her armour it barely chilled her. Shulamak had obviously been a lax teacher. The apprentice’s face twisted with fear and frustration, and Celestaine yelled at the lot of them to put their weapons down, hoping that some might understand the words. They didn’t, but they didn’t fight her either, just backing off, keeping their swords and spears levelled at her but only to stop her following.

  Shulamak’s roar of fury split the air, and she turned to see him thrusting a hand at her, even as Heno’s own fire started to bite him. Defeat was in his face: his followers were falling around his feet, but most of all it was those who would not fight that incensed him. He was going to die, but he was going to kill her first, because he knew the Kinslayer was dead and the skull was a sham, and he knew she was to blame.

  She began to run at him, knowing the fire was faster than she’d ever be, but then a huge shape loomed over the cadaverous Heart Taker. Nedlam stooped and came up with something limp and flopping in her hands, and brought the weight of it down across the back of Shulamak’s neck, heedless of the spitting fire.

  That sufficed, as it turned out. The old Heart Taker broke like a stick, leaving Nedlam grinning down at him, still holding her makeshift weapon. She called something proudly over to Heno, who was just sauntering through the arch as though he owned the place, brushing frost from his robes. At Celestaine’s look, he rolled his eyes. “She says she told me you could beat someone to death with one of their friends in a battle. She’s always wanted to try it.”

  Thukrah limped in after Heno, barking out orders and plainly very pleased with himself. He spared a particular grin for Celestaine. “All good, thought your Slacker wasn’t going to make it, but all good. Let’s get these no-goods up top, hrm? Then we talk.”

  Amkulyah was at her elbow, but Celestaine didn’t need the reminder. “I think we keep going to this mage-forge.” Before your people get to creep in and strip it behind my back.

  Thukrah’s expression neither confirmed nor denied that intention. “All good. I’ll come with, me and some of mine. The rest will see about these losers.”

  “What will you do to them?”

  “Rip out their livers and place them on spikes, warning to the others.” At her expression, Thukrah laughed uproariously. “These are my kin! Bad leaders, once, but now they have me, a good leader. They get the shit jobs until they make us like them. Besides, you ever seen a liver on a spike? Ridiculous, warning to nobody.”

  In the room beyond, where the walking wounded had come from, they found children. Only a handful, but when the Kinslayer had mobilised his armies, he had taken only those fit to fight. The Yorughan had been taken from their families, never to see them again, in most cases. Heno said that close family ties were frowned on, back in the bowels of the earth—any loyalty that wasn’t to their master was suspect. But the Kinslayer’s power only went so far. Family and camaraderie were a constant counterculture amongst the Yorughan and the other minion races.

  “General, you knew the layout up here, you know where the forge is.” Heno strode up.

  “Yes, yes, below, even more below,” Thukrah told them. “Come on, then, let’s see what’s what.”

  “Will there be more down there?” Celestaine asked him.

  “More of these no-goods? Maybe some guards to keep loot out of pockets. Maybe worse.”

  It was worse, of course. They found a shaft leading down, studded with metal rungs. The surviving apprentice came with them, only too happy to spill all the beans there were in order to keep his hide intact. Heno listened to his babblings and then cursed. Celestaine had already picked up the world Vathesk.

  “So your fire’s no use,” she said. The otherworld demons the Kinslayer had summoned and abandoned were notoriously resistant to any kind of magic.

  “Shulamak was after recruiting it,” Thukrah said. “Sent some boys down to say hello. It ate them. And then yakked up the bits because, you know, Vathesk.”

  “Have to kill it, then.” Nedlam rolled her shoulders. “Shame.”

  Celestaine nodded, because it was. The Vathesk were even less to blame for their situation than the Yorughan.

  “That sword of yours good against Vathesk shell?” the general asked her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, starting down the ladder.

  Close to the end of the shaft she heard the thing prowling about, claws scraping the stone. It was very dark down there, but Heno could help with that, at least. She rapped her sword pommel on the side of the shaft to signal him, and he dropped a chill will-o-the-wisp down past her that flitted into the chamber below and danced aside, shedding a wan blueish radiance.

  The Vathesk gave out a ghastly sound like bottled suffering and skittered over towards it. They never roared or threatened, the Vathesk. They begged, they pleaded, evident to all even though their language was alien even to the Kinslayer’s other minions. They made entreating motions with their mouthparts and whimpered. And then they killed, even though they knew that they could eat none of it.

  She saw its broad carapace pass beneath her and tried to drop onto it, but got kicked by one of its jointed legs instead. With a sobbing wail, the Vathesk turned on her. Twice the size of a horse, it filled the end of the chamber. Its body was a broad shield like a crab’s, beneath which a clutch of limbs sprouted, some of them legs, some little toothed arms for manipulating, but most prominently its two great pincers that could scissor open the strongest mail or take an arm off without slowing. Its head was just a jutting projection at the front of its shell, flanked by faceted eyes like jewels. They wept, those eyes; all the pain in the world was within them.

  “You can’t eat me. I don’t taste good,” Celestaine told it. Vathesk couldn’t form human words or even Yorughan words, but they picked up languages effortlessly. “Don’t make this a fight, come on.”

  For a moment, she thought she might have got through to it. The monster shook its rattling body and whined like a dog, backing away from her blade. Then the ravening hunger got the better of it and its claws clattered as it bounded towards her.

  She had killed Vathesk before, though the enclosed space was not ideal. She ran to meet it, dropping to her back beneath its initial charge and hearing a thousand scrapes across her backplate that no amount of polish would quite get out. Her blade scored across its ridged underbelly, parting its plates and laying open the honeycomb of their interior, but cutting no deeper. Vathesk were appallingly robust, even for her sword.

  It gave out a shocked sound and flailed at her with its pincers, raking great furrows in the stone around her. She hacked at one smaller arm that reached for her, chopping through its hooked claw, and waited for her reinforcements.

  Nedlam just dropped boots-first onto the Vathesk’s back. From the impact, she had been building speed down the length of the shaft, and Celestaine heard something crack explosively beneath her heels. Then she was tumbling free, rolling to her feet with her cleavers out as the Vathesk rounded on her. Arrows began to flit down, Amkulyah sighting into the circle he could see from above. His shafts just shattered against its hide, though, one even bounding back from the Vathesk’s beautiful crystalline eye.

  The monster tore at Nedlam, clipping her with enough force to knock her from her feet. Vathesk were insanely strong. Their only saving grace as an opponent was that they were not warriors, back where they came from; just the people of a peaceful world unlucky enough to be discovered by the Kinslayer.

  Celestaine kept that in mind when she rammed her sword to the hilt in the creature’s underbelly, lunging forwards to unseam it to its mouth. Even that didn’t kill it, but while it was rearing up and lamenting she let Nedlam boost her high enough to drive her blade between its eyes and into its brain.

  A mercy. I hopeit was a mercy.

  They found the Vathesk’s
lair soon after, an alcove with walls covered in intricate diagrams and alien writing, carved into the rock by the creature’s claws. There was a whole epic treatise there, thousands of characters in neat columns supported by what looked like the sort of geometry that Celestaine had never been able to even start on. Looking at it, she felt ignorant and mean and bloody-handed.

  “Trying to get itself home,” Heno suggested, after he and Thukrah had come down.

  Celestaine shrugged morosely. Killing the Vathesk had left her with a bad taste in her mouth, but it was worse than that. “Where is it, then?”

  They had found the mage-forge, but the fires were cold, and even the tools had gone. There were no half-completed treasures lining the walls, no racks of magic swords or Heart Taker staves, no enchanted armour made to the Kinslayer’s own measurements. No magic jewels of making; no crown.

  “Someone’s been over this place,” Thukrah said, and, at her look, laughed. “You think we sneak a Grennishman past Shulamak’s lot and the Vathesk, and he comes out carrying all the loot? No, some power did this, some real power.” He shook his head. “So, no thing for you, no loot for us. Pfesh!”

  “I hear singing,” Amkulyah said. The statement was odd enough to silence everyone.

  “What, you…?” Celestaine tailed off. There had been a tune in her head, one that she knew very well indeed from the war, but she’d thought it was just one of those songs that got stuck in her ear and wouldn’t come out. Now she listened, and perhaps it wasn’t just inside after all. “Heno, do you…?”

  Heno didn’t, but by that time Celestaine was sure she did. She prowled about the forge until she came to a point where the song was loudest. It was ‘The Boys of White Feris,’ a Lantir ballad that had been all about the free armies after Lannet fell and its soldiers went to join anyone who was still fighting. With the eyes of the rest on her, she joined in with the verse, butchering the tune as she always had. Ralas had made fun of her so much, calling her the worst Forinthi hero, saying her ancestors would crawl from their graves because she was so little the ideal warrior-bard of legend. Even croaking through three bars of White Feris she could hear his voice as he castigated her: “Celestaine, you sound like a dog gargling mud.”

  She smiled sadly, despite herself, and met Heno’s gaze. His eyes were wide.

  “What?” she asked him, but he was holding up a finger and that distant voice was still calling her name. “Celestaine!”

  Nedlam stamped next to her, and they all heard the hollow knock of it. A moment later she was on one knee, using a cleaver’s edge to pry at a crack in the ground, and then just going to get a mace and battering at the floor.

  “Back,” Celestaine warned her, and then cut a new hatch approximating the actual one they couldn’t get open, carving two rough dents in so Nedlam could get her fingers in to lift it out.

  Below there was a cell, no other way to put it. It was too small for someone to lie down in, and had been too low to stand straight in before Celestaine’s impromptu improvements. A ragged man was hunched there like a bundle of sticks, turning a wild-eyed, hollow face to them. Celestaine felt her heart stop, then hammer painfully at her ribs.

  “Ralas?”

  The prisoner below let out a wretched laugh. “Is it? Am I? I don’t really know. But I know you, my dear warrior bard. I’d know that terrible voice anywhere. How are you? How’s everyone? How’s the war?”

  “It’s… it’s over,” Celestaine stammered out, staring so hard she thought her eyes would fall out. “But Ralas, you died. Everyone thought you’d died. If there was any chance, we’d have… I’m so sorry, I…”

  With lordly grace the emaciated figure waved her apologies away. “No, no, you’re right.”

  “I’m…?”

  “I died. I died a lot.” His eyes glittered madly at her. “But I got better.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “I KNOW WHO he’s supposed to be,” Heno snapped. “I don’t trust him just being here.” He scowled over at Ralas, who was sitting on the ground and staring at the clouds as though he had half-forgotten what they were.

  He had looked better in his time, Celestaine admitted, although surely that argued for him being the man, and not some trick or imposter—they’d have made a fake more convincing than this threadbare reality. She’d even wondered if this was some mad scheme of the Undefeated to get into her good graces, at first, but Ralas had not made any demands of her, nor promises either. He had been carried out into the open by Thukrah’s people like a scarecrow, and left there to look at the sun.

  He was horribly thin, his limbs seeming to be just skin over old bones. When he stripped off the filthy rag of his shirt, she could see each individual rib and where they had been broken and not quite healed. Someone had taken their fists and boots to him not long ago, it seemed, and on and off for a long while before then: his skin was a mosaic of bruise-colours, blue and purple, red and yellow. A blow to his face had swelled up the skin until one eye was almost hidden, and when he walked it was with a halting limp where one foot was crooked.

  He must have felt her eyes on him, for he glanced over and smiled. His teeth were yellow but all present, seeming outsized in his sunken face. As she went over to him, he waved. His hands were perfect too, not a finger broken.

  “Ralas, who was holding you down there?” she asked him gently. “Was it Shulamak? Was it one of these?” She jabbed a finger at Thukrah’s new recruits from below. Her attitude to them had soured remarkably after the discovery of the prisoner.

  “Oh, warrior-bard, always looking to mete out justice,” he said. His voice was still his, far more than his face or figure, the words dancing to an unconscious music he could never quite suppress. They had pared him down, but left the things that made him Ralas.

  “I don’t know about justice. I’ll settle for helping. Right now I’ll help you get revenge on whoever did this to you.”

  He laughed, though his eyes glittered with tears. “Oh, you’re too late, too late for that.”

  “Ralas, I’m looking at you, and someone put their fist in your face no more than three hours ago, best guess.” She pointed at the rainbow colours of his black eye and he flinched back. “See, still tender, isn’t it?”

  This time the boundary between laughter and tears was much harder to draw. “Oh, it is, warrior-bard, it is. But it’s old news, that no true teller would bother with. And you revenged me anyway, they tell me. The Kinslayer, at your hand?”

  “Me and the others. Lathenry, Roherich, Shoel…” Names of the absent, names of the dead, and Ralas had been on that latter list until just now. “Help me,” she said to him. “Give me something I can understand.”

  “He took me,” Ralas told her. “He took me and had lads like these work me over. He kept me on water and worms. All fair treatment, for a prisoner of the Kinslayer. I wasn’t the only one. He wanted to break me, but I sang until he gagged me and I hummed after that. I made the walls and the bars my instrument. When he brought me out for execution I sang ‘Towers of Coin and Copper’ to the torturers and ‘Gisella the Red’ to the headsman, and ‘Three Farmers of Doubty’ to the Kinslayer himself.”

  “You didn’t!” Celestaine goggled at him. ‘Three Farmers’ was the earthiest sort of raunchy folk song. She tried to imagine Ralas standing surrounded by all the Kinslayer’s monsters and belting out the verse about the innkeeper and the… “What happened?”

  Ralas’s thin finger drew a line across his throat. “At least it was quick.”

  She stared, waiting for him to say it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke.

  “Woke up after that, on a big old stone table with a pack of those Heart Taker boys all over me,” he went on. “Kinslayer was there, too, and it looked like he’d been through a few of them before because they were surely glad for their lives that they’d got him what he wanted.”

  “Which was?”

  “Me.” Ralas shrugged. “Got in his head, didn’t I? Turned out, all those times I’d been in my cell
going through my repertoire, himself had been spying. Turns out he hated my damn guts more than any human alive, by the end, for the thoughts I put in his head. And yet, after he’d gotten me out of the way, the songs just went round and round, telling him, And there was more than this, if you hadn’t whacked his head off like that. Turns out this was a thing he’d been working on anyway, because, you know, he was the Kinslayer, and even death was just his stock in trade and not his master. He meant it for himself, of course, but he tried it out on me, and I guess he could never make it work for anyone else, or I never did hear of it, and you seem pretty damned sure he’s dead.”

  “Oh, he’s dead,” Celestaine confirmed. “If I’m sure of nothing else, I’m sure of that. So he made you… sing for him?”

  “And when I displeased him, with what I sang or what I didn’t, he killed me again,” Ralas told her. “Only it never took. Nothing does. This,” and he pointed to the raw bruise on his cheek, “this was years ago, Warrior-bard.”

  She sat down heavily beside him, aware of Heno’s gaze on her. Ralas nodded companionably to the Heart Taker. “Interesting company you keep, hey?”

  “Friends,” she said firmly. “Heno, and over there’s Nedlam and Kul. We’re trying to help.”

  Ralas laughed softly, more genuinely. “Of course you are. When they write your story, warrior-bard, they will have to invent some lover or sibling you couldn’t save, to explain your eternal guilt.”