Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “It’s not guilt, it’s duty,” she told him, more sharply than she had intended. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “And why your duty?”

  “Who else was there—is there?”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. “All the world, my warrior-bard, and yet here you are. What are you up to now? Looking for more demigods to kill?”

  “I want to restore the Aethani.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “You could help. You…” Her voice faltered. “I’ve missed you, rhymer.”

  “It would have been kinder if you’d not found me,” he said. “I’m not what I was.” The next laugh was forced. “How will you, anyway? The Aethani, I mean.”

  “A clever man said there are artefacts that might… remake them, return them to what they were. Some of them, all of them, even just a few. We thought there was one here.”

  Ralas was silent, frowning. “A crown-looking thing all over with gems?”

  Celestaine stared at him. “You saw it?”

  “Your source was good, it was here. But some bastard came and took it. I know because he got me out of that damn cell to take a look at me, and then slammed me back in.”

  “What man? Who took it?”

  “Well, he didn’t take the time to introduce himself, and he was inconsiderate enough not to take his helm off. All I saw was that he was a big matey wearing Ilkand Temple robes and holding this precious fancy hat. He could have just left me to find my own way out, but no, he just slung me back in so hard he killed me again.”

  “Ilkand?”

  Ralas shrugged again. “Every damn thing in the world goes through there eventually, isn’t that what they say? Why not fancy hats?”

  “That was the Kinslayer’s crown, it’s got about a half dozen top grade relics in it. It’s the power to help the Aethani. It’s probably the power to do a lot of worse things as well.”

  Ralas shrugged. “I wasn’t really in a good place to argue the toss with him while he was killing me. What’s the Ilkand Temple like these days?”

  “Not sure.” Ilkand had fallen to the Kinslayer a couple of times but never for long, what with the influx of fighters sailing in from north and east. The Temple itself had survived, but then it had been one of the fire-and-battle types that the Kinslayer had almost encouraged.

  Ilkand, then. Which left one question. “Will you go there with us?”

  “Your man there, he might not like that.” Ralas cocked his head at Heno, who was still glowering. “Jealous type, is he?”

  “I… we’re not—” she stammered over the knee-jerk denial. “How did you—? It’s not…”

  “I have been too dead too often to judge anyone,” Ralas said exhaustedly. “I don’t want to go anywhere for more heroics, warrior-bard. I want to die.” And, at her appalled stare, “I do. I want to die, to just not-be. But the Kinslayer’s probably the only one who could pull that off, and he’s gone, and so here I am, not dying any time soon, or possibly forever. Gods, what a thought.”

  “I’ll take care of you,” Celestaine promised. “We’ll… feed you up, put a poultice on…”

  “You’ve not been listening to a word I’ve said, have you?” Ralas said, lowering himself back until he was lying full length in the dust. “I don’t eat, and if I do, it doesn’t stop me being hungry. I don’t heal, any more than I would keep any new bruises your Yogg friend might give me. This is me, the way I was when the Kinslayer had me killed, forever and forever. But yes, warrior-bard, I’ll go with you. I don’t have any engagements for the foreseeable future. I may as well make myself useful.”

  “WELL, I RECKON we can hitch up the sheep-cart and get to Ilkand way before them,” Fisher suggested, stretching. “They’ll be stuck on the river again, most likely.”

  Doctor Catt made an indeterminate noise. “You know, if I hadn’t actually been watching, I’d think we were the victims of some manner of circumlocution.”

  Fisher gave him a blank stare. “What now?”

  “You know, that they’d already located the crown and were staging this mummery for our benefit,” Catt explained. He let himself down from the wall top and took up his walking stick, striking a rakish pose. “Some priest from the Ilkin vengeance-mongers slips past all that mob of villains without an altercation, discovers this poor Ralas character but abandons him and makes off with the crown?”

  “Kills him,” Fisher pointed out. “Just wearing the vestments doesn’t make you a good priest.”

  “In my humble opinion, none of the Ilkin Temple are particularly benign examples of the clergy,” Catt said primly.

  At his expectant stare, Fisher sighed and shouldered his pack. “So, we’re not going to just hotfoot it and beat them there.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll continue to play the shadow to the Lady Celestaine’s lamp for a while. I confess myself suspicious of some manner of subterfuge; to wit, it may be a trap.”

  “It’s always a trap,” Fisher grumbled. “Besides, they don’t like us in Ilkand. Not at the Temple end, anyway.”

  “A matter of supreme indifference to me,” Catt said airily. “I have some insurance, on that front.”

  “Don’t try and sell them any relics,” Fisher warned. “Priests never appreciate it.”

  “YOU SURE YOU don’t want to stick around?” Thukrah asked. “You, I can use. Your strong-woman here, use her as well, and your arrow-boy. Not sold on the Slacker but I’ll take him as part of the bargain.”

  “Use me as propaganda against the loyalists?” Celestaine asked acidly. They were in Thukrah’s study again, reclining and sharing a bottle of gleaming red that probably came from one of the vineyards of the Lucevien, now just ash and salt.

  Thukrah toasted her with the outsize wooden mug he was swigging the wine from. “Yes,” he agreed. “Show them the hands that killed the Reck—the Kinslayer, sure enough. More of those no-goods come over to me without a fight. Saving lives and limbs, hrm?”

  “I need to go to Ilkand and see what can be salvaged of all this.” She shook her head, disgusted. “One little clue, and if our man just stole a habit because he liked the look, then we’re at a dead end.”

  “Ilkand,” Thukrah rumbled. “Not so good of a place.”

  Celestaine frowned at him. “City of a hundred open doors, so they say.”

  “They shut a whole load of them because of us, not opened since. I sent there, offering strong backs, strong arms. They sent back a hammer. You know what that means, to Temple Ilkand? Means they want to come and hit me in the face about now, but they got more pressing matters. Your two, her and the Slacker, they’ll not get much of a welcome there.”

  “So, let me guess, I should leave them with you?”

  The general shrugged. “Can if you want. Don’t have to. I’m just saying,”

  “I’ll leave them outside the gates when we get there,” Celestaine decided, despite the little voice that said, Didn’t work so well in Bladno or Cinquetann.

  “North of the wall, some Arvennir bunch, call themselves the Foxglove Order,” Thukrah told her. “We sell them iron, they trade it to Ilkand. Ilkin don’t ask questions so long as it doesn’t have our dirty hands on it. I show you to them, they get you to Ilkand.”

  “That’s good of you, general.”

  He shrugged, waving an arm expansively and lashing a long chain of wine up the wall. “You did good for me, and you got nothing but that walking corpse out of it.”

  She sipped at the wine. They said you could taste the ash, that the Kinslayer destroyed the vineyards so thoroughly it tainted even their previous vintages. “General, what will you do, when you’ve got all the Yorughan here under your hand?”

  “Will I go all fire and sword on you people, that what you mean?” Thukrah gave her his most charming smile. “Not the plan. Plan is we live, we bring up family, raise brats, trade, see the sun every day and the moon every night.” His look put her on the spot and demanded honesty. “You think they’ll let that happen?�
�

  “I’m sure they will.” She hoped she sounded more convincing to him than herself.

  THE FOXGOVE ORDER were a pragmatic enough lot, and Celestaine watched them carefully unpacking Thukrah’s iron and re-crating it with Arvennir stamps so that nobody had to ask where it came from. The general’s assessment of the current Ilkin regime plainly had some substance behind it. Taking two Yorughan to the gates of Ilkand was going to cause some sort of diplomatic issue, but they were happy enough to drop their guests off within sight of the famous sea-wall and ask no further questions.

  They rode north by cart to a Yorughan-built fort that had once served the Kinslayer’s forces as a staging post for their attacks on the seaport city, and thereafter by river on a Shelliac convoy, five boats carrying a dozen smaller parties as well as the Arvennir and Celestaine’s band, and they were not the river’s only traffic. Temple or not, Ilkand was plainly still a desirable destination.

  “Trade, some of it,” the Arvennir constable said, “but talk, too. Our chapter Turcopolier is in Ilkand to talk, and the Lily and the Dogstooth have men there.” He squinted down the line of boats as though trying to bring their destinations closer by sheer scrutiny. “The Frostclaw, the Ystachi, the Udrengasi, all sending chieftains to shout at each other, and some Tzarkoman grave-judge come over to rattle his bones at them. Sure to be some of your Forinthi clans. And all the rest, the mercenary companies who never got paid, the commune leaders who want to keep the land they ended up with, all of that.”

  “What have I missed, why all this?” Celestaine asked him carefully. Arvenhal was enough like Middle Kingdom speech that she could manage it, but there were always words that, for unknown reasons, were innocuous in one and vastly offensive in the other.

  “War’s over, did you miss that?” He grinned, a man who knows what his job is and doesn’t need to worry about politics. “Everyone has an idea about what to do about it all—people where they’re not supposed to be, not enough food here, not enough wood there. And Ilkand is easy to get to, so that’s where they go to shout at each other about it.”

  “And the Temple?”

  He shrugged. “Temple runs Ilkand. Who else? So they get to play host while their guests shout at each other.”

  “What about the Harbourmaster’s Council… oh, no, they’re gone.” The third and last time the Kinslayer got troops inside the city, he had thrown the councillors to the sharks and hung the old Harbourmaster from his own sea wall, before being forced out again almost before the body had stopped swinging.

  The Arvennir nodded philosophically. “Wouldn’t want to be those priests, though,” he added, but then rolled an eye at Celestaine. “Wouldn’t want to be your Yoggs, either. Lots of raw war-wounds in Ilkand right now.

  They got off the river before the convoy reached the walls, and trekked north until they came to the road and a shabby-looking inn. Celestaine knew the deal with inns this close to a city—who would ever stay at one unless they had good reason not to go inside? The rule was no questions asked, money up front and don’t complain to the management if your possessions walked away in the middle of the night. Their fellow guests were a motley of maybe-merchants-maybe-criminals waiting for word or goods to reach them from Ilkand, plus a small band of skinny Grennishmen touting their services as tinkers. Celestaine paid out more money than she was happy with to get Heno and Nedlam ensconced in a room.

  “The rest of us will go in and see if we can get access to the Temple, somehow. Ralas and I might just have a friend who can help.”

  “Roherich,” the ragged bard supplied. “Do you think he’s still there?”

  “He always came back to Ilkand,” she said determinedly. Roherich, the Lord of the Silver Tower, whose magic had held off a dozen Heart Takers while she and the rest took on the Kinslayer. Roherich the long-lived, whose melancholy eyes had seen the Kinslayer’s first bloody arrival a century before, and who had walked through the worst reaches of the war when he came back. Not a man it was easy to call ‘friend,’ but he had never faltered in the fight, shown no weakness, admitted no pain. He could find the crown, perhaps; he could find some relief for Ralas. Maybe he could just heal the Aethani and they could let the whole Crown of the Kinslayer business go hang. What couldn’t such a man achieve, now the Kinslayer was done?

  She said nothing of the uneasy thought that perhaps Roherich held the Kinslayer’s Crown even now, and had plans for it that would conflict with her own.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ILKAND HAD ALWAYS been a melting pot. Celestaine had fond memories of entering Low Ilkand by this very gate, hearing greetings, threats and offers of wares in four languages and twenty accents. The sea breeze blowing in chill off the water, the creak of rigging and the grinding of cranes from the docks, the mingled scents of a hundred different dishes from all over the world. Up above, Temple Ilkand still loomed over the harbour like a parent, but she had always felt like the parent was on the point of reining in its rebellious child, never quite acting. Now the parent was midway through delivering a slap, or that was the sense she had of it.

  Of course, Temple Ilkand wasn’t just the Temple itself. Up on the bluff were all the offices of government from which the late Harbourmaster and his wealthy fellows had administrated the port’s unbounded trade. Up there, as well, was the slender gleaming needle of the Silver Tower, the unchallenged domain of the magician Roherich, fellow Slayer, ally and hopefully still friend.

  “He’ll know what’s what,” Celestaine said.

  Ralas gave another of his loose shrugs. “Better you ask than me. He never could stand to listen to me. And that says something about the man. The Kinslayer wanted to hear me again, when I was gone. Roherich would have left me to rot.” He considered that. “So I prefer Roherich, in the end, but I don’t like him.”

  Celestaine shrugged. Roherich hadn’t liked anyone, she thought. Not that he was hostile in any way, just that part of his mind that connected with other living things had withered and died, along with various other mental facilities he had been born with, while the rest of him had stretched out over the years, fuelled by his researches. He had come to fight the Kinslayer out of an intellectual duty and because his own work was under threat. He had expended decades of stored power, given sage advice, bloodied his hands and suffered wounds and losses, but there had always been a distance between him and the world.

  And Ralas’s music had repelled him, that much was true. It had reminded him too much of his missing parts.

  They saw three fights before they got five streets into Low Ilkand, which wouldn’t have been out of place in the old days; but these weren’t just drunken brawls. In each case, she could see tribe against tribe, nation against nation. The angry words were not just threats but accusations—who had failed to come to whose aid, who had hoarded, who had collaborated. Blood was shed two times of three, and one cocky Arvennir ended up losing an arm to a howling mad Frostclaw’s blade, but the arrival of the Templars killed off each brawl, just by the sight of them. Whether they were genuinely the select martial servants of the Temple, Celestaine wasn’t sure, but they had the shield-mark on their surcoats and they turned up mob-handed and ready to cudgel anything that didn’t give way. She didn’t feel like asking them for an escort up to Temple Ilkand.

  That reticence left her and Ralas outside the huge stone portal of Temple Gate, the chief thoroughfare to the higher city, which was pointedly shut. It had been ripped from its hinges by the Kinslayer’s monsters in the second siege, she’d heard, but of all the broken things in the world, this had apparently been a priority to restore, and now it loured over the crowd in Gate Market Square with its stern images of armed Guardians ready to defend the Right from the Wrong. Being in Low Ilkand and looking up at that gate certainly made people feel that they were amongst the Wrong.

  Ralas jabbed a finger upwards to draw her eye. The lifts were still working, or had been repaired as well—wooden platforms worked by pulleys and wheels, which ferried goods and gues
ts up to the Harbourmaster’s High Dock. Celestaine had never had to ride one, but then Temple Gate had always been open before.

  It looked as though a lot of people had business in Temple Ilkand, and few of them were having much joy of it. Most of the crowd there had obviously already been rebuffed by the Templars controlling the lifts, and only goods seemed to be going up, rather than people. Presumably the various ambassadors and dignitaries were already housed up above, and Ilkand’s current regime didn’t want to deal with the mass of refugees, agitators and supporters seething about the city below.

  She looked speculatively at Ralas. He was cleaner than when they’d pulled him out of the hole, and wearing some ill-fitting clothes they’d bartered from the Arvennir, but he hadn’t lied: he was just as much of a battered starveling as before, and even his long hair and beard regrew any lost inches the moment the scissors stopped their work. The one thing that changed about him was how cripplingly tired he looked. She herself cut a slightly more presentable figure, but still little more than ‘itinerant Forinthi mercenary,’ all told.

  “You think they’d let us up for a song?” he asked her drily.

  “No. I think we lead with our names.” She smiled at his blank look. “Say it with me, Ralas: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’”

  IN NO MORE than half an hour they were watching one Governor Adondra glare down an Udrengasi seer and a blue-scaled Ystachi Dragon Speaker as each tried to accuse the other of crimes going back three generations, backed by groups of glowering, muttering followers. Everyone was talking in the local Kandir, which Celestaine knew well, but her city Kandir and the barbarously accented speech of the ambassadors seemed worlds apart. The seed of the dispute, as far as Celestaine could understand it, was that the armies of the Kinslayer had, while sweeping like a tide across the Udrengasi lake-cantrevs, looted the tombs of various fathers and forefathers, which loot had then met a high tide mark in the Ystachi’s mountains, where some of it had beached. The Udrengasi wanted it back; the Ystachi, whose own sacred glades and hatcheries had been burned, claimed it as spoils of war. Adondra argued doggedly with both sides, chipping away a compromise by apparently seeking the exact point where everyone was equally dissatisfied with what they were getting. She didn’t even glance at her new guests, giving everything she had over to bludgeoning the ambassadors with words until they bent. At the last, she took a hammer from her belt—perhaps it was a ceremonial tool, but it looked entirely capable of smashing skulls—and lamped it against a pillar, silencing everyone with the high, clear ring of steel.