Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“You see?” Amkulyah said, and she followed the line of his finger. Ah, yes. That.

  She thought she had misunderstood him, that he was just marking out his place of pain for her. “When they carved all this, it was just, well, one more place the faithful went.”

  He frowned at her. “Do you truly not see it?”

  She didn’t, but then she lacked his eyes, designed to see fine detail from on high.

  “It’s been covered over now,” he told her. “But recently. Someone’s marked this.”

  THEY COULDN’T GET any more words with the Archimandrite, who was now going through the Temple imparting the gods’ faint and fragmentary message. Celestaine was still startled by how devout the man had turned out to be. The Ilkand Temple had surely been ripe for some demagogue who wanted nothing more than to turn people’s fear and uncertainty into personal power, and for one such as that, any message of peace would have been anathema. The Archimandrite, to his credit, had heard the gods, or at least believed he had, and had become a different man. He even seemed relieved not to have to hammer the world flat in the name of vengeance. There was, she thought, a kind man buried in him, that had always been desperate to get out.

  If he was relieved, then not half so much as Adondra. Celestaine still didn’t feel she liked the Governor, but the woman had been caught between the chaotic mass of refugees crowding the city and the Temple’s unyielding obsessions. Now it seemed the Templars would be doing more than simply keeping the peace. Celestaine imagined them building new homes, distributing food, returning lost children to frantic parents. Who knew? Perhaps if she came back in a month, this new message would be twisted into a reason for persecution and punishment, but she hoped not. Against the backdrop the war and its end had left her—a land broken, exhausted and riven with factions old and new—it was good to have a little gem of hope.

  Adondra could spare them some time, while she waited to see precisely which way the Temple would jump. She had their answers too, now that they knew the right questions to ask.

  “We all thought he was a Templar from one of the further outposts. After all, the war jumbled everyone together, as we Ilkin know more than most,” she explained, looking up at the map. “Big man, been in the wars, certainly. He came in, saw how it worked around here, then two days later he’d lit out, nobody saw him again. But somehow he’d got into the Temple Courtyard here and vandalised the place, hacked a symbol there and broke Vigilant’s statue. The Templars plastered over it, of course, restored the place as best they could…” She glanced at Amkulyah, whose gaze was still fixed fiercely on the map.

  “What symbol?” Celestaine asked.

  Kul demonstrated, tracing the shape with his finger: three flat-based triangles in a line, touching. A crown.

  Over the defacement the Templars had restored the original place name so well that Celestaine could only see the damage this close. Dorhambri, read the letters. Just a little mining town, when they had first been carved.

  “It won’t be like it was,” she assured Amkulyah, but he didn’t seem to hear her. No doubt he was fighting back the memories of being a slave in that place, buried beneath the earth, for long years.

  After Adondra had gone, Heno shook his head “So, what,” he asked, “the thief came through here and just thought to let us know where he was heading?”

  “He had friends following,” Nedlam suggested, squinting at the map.

  “Far easier ways of going about it,” Celestaine said. “Heno’s right, there’s a trap here somewhere. But if there’s a trap, there’s also something to lead us to our thief.”

  “If they didn’t want to be found, why bother?” Nedlam wanted to know. Celestaine could only agree with her.

  “A test,” Ralas called. He was still sitting on the stacked firewood, massaging his legs and waving away Templars and random citizens who wanted him to sing for them.

  “For what, though?” Celestaine asked, and he shrugged.

  “Perhaps someone’s watching. Perhaps they’ll be waiting for us at Dorhambri with a chest of gold and some cake, to reward us for our persistence. And perhaps I’ll poke them in the eye for leaving me in that hole in Bleakmairn.”

  Celestine rubbed at her face. “We will go to Dorhambri. Or else we find some other artefact of making, because I don’t see what else there is? Kul? It’s your call.”

  “Really?” The Aethani was regarding her without expression.

  “Yes.” She frowned at him. “You don’t want to go back to Dorhambri, fine, we won’t. Or you stay here and the rest of us will go, or however you want. Or we find Doctor Catt, wherever he’s got to, and see if he can put us onto anything else.”

  “I don’t trust Doctor Catt,” Amkulyah said sourly. “I don’t trust why he’s here and not in his shop back in that place.” He shook himself angrily and his wing-limbs spasmed like clutching talons. “I don’t trust human heroes with causes.”

  Celestaine stared at him. “…What?”

  “What is it you keep telling that beggar-Guardian who follows you? You won’t make him important. Am I the way you stay important, Celestaine the Slayer? Is that what my people are, to you?”

  “How could you say that?” She gaped at him. “I’m in this to help you, Kul, you and all of your people, if we can. No more than that.”

  He held her gaze for a moment, then looked away and shrugged, another convulsive shudder of his crippled parts. “Then let’s go to Dorhambri. Like you say, I’m sure it’s completely different now.”

  “It will be,” Celestaine assured him, hearing her voice so artificially bright and cheery because his words had hit home, deep inside her. Ever since the Kinslayer died, what have I been doing, save try to recapture that moment? Trying to make up for the people I couldn’t save? Perhaps I owe Deffo an apology.

  LOOKING DOWN AT the courtyard, shrouded from the view of others, Catt and Fisher eavesdropped shamelessly on the conversation. There had been a distance between them, since the business with the Archimandrite and the skull, and Fisher waited with infinite patience for the other man to bridge it.

  At long last Catt cleared his throat awkwardly. “I just wanted to say, well, those shenanigans with the gods, what the priest heard from Cinnabran’s skull… that was just a scam, was it not? I mean, well done, obviously. A very subtle and ably targeted piece of business, but I’m sure it was just some magicianly sleight-of-hand at work.”

  Fisher grunted. “So no actual thanks for saving your hide.”

  “What?” Catt looked at him with genuine puzzlement. “Oh, I would have thought of something.” He waved away the thought dismissively. “But it’s been preying on my mind a little, what the priest said. And I would like to peer behind the veil a little, and be reassured that it was all just flummery.”

  Fisher just waited, one eyebrow slightly up as though to raise it the full way would be far too much effort.

  “Only,” Catt went on, wringing the hem of his robe a little, “it would be rather a dreadful thing, if it wasn’t just that the connection between the gods’ lips and our ears was obstructed, but that the gods Themselves were… drifting in some dreadful void somehow, further and further with each passing moment, reaching back towards us, Their beloved creation, for some final message before They passed beyond all hope of us hearing Them.” His voice had grown thin and forlorn and now he coughed and shook himself as though trying to be rid of the sentiment. “I just mean, that would be rather awful for all concerned, all things considered.”

  He looked to Fisher hopefully, but for a moment the other man was just staring down at the Guardian statues below, and the moment lengthened between them, and Catt fidgeted and plucked at his cuffs.

  At last, Fisher forced a sly look onto his face, that complicity their entire friendship was based on, and Catt laughed, nervously loud, so that it rang across the courtyard below. “I knew it was a scheme, I knew it. You can fool these credulous religious types, but not me, Fishy. And really, what a trite final message! Be nice
to each other! As if the gods would be so banal.” And Fisher neither confirmed or denied the accusation, but Catt seized on it nonetheless, shaking off the melancholy thought of the gods receding into an infinite eternity, denied Their creation just as Their work was denied its gods.

  “Anyway, we’d better get the sheep chariot out again,” Catt decided. “Looks like they’re going for Dorhambri. And it’s a trap, according to them.”

  “’Course it is,” Fisher said scornfully.

  “Know what I think?” Catt asked, rhetorically as it turned out, for he left no gap. “Our crown-purloining miscreant must be well aware that others such as we would be trying to locate his prize, and would divine its location by magic eventually. No doubt this is some fellow connoisseur of the magical, probably someone we’ve actually met and done business with, given how small the trade actually is. We’ve done our own misdirection and sabotage, haven’t we? If you know you’ve got a choice piece that everyone’s on your heels for, better to ambush your rivals in some place of your choosing, don’t you think? So lucky, therefore, that we have a genuine hero and a pair of formidable brutes to take the brunt of it on our behalf.”

  “And some scrawny Aethani kid,” Fisher added. “And an undead musician.”

  Catt waved them away, obviously more impressed with the two Yorughan as unwitting pawns. “I think they’ll flush out our rival collector admirably. In fact I’m rather delighted at the wisdom of my strategy.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE MOST DIRECT route from Ilkand to the mines of Dorhambri was overland, and right through Hathel Vale. Of course, nobody went through Hathel Vale any more, but skirting it was still the most direct route, and apparently there was, if not a road, then at least a well-beaten track. Iron shipments, Adondra explained, still came north to the city sometimes, on and off.

  “It won’t be like you remember,” Celestaine had to reassure Amkulyah after that. “There will be free miners there, just like there were before the Kinslayer came. Just because it’s a mine doesn’t mean it’s… bad.”

  She looked to her companions for moral support, but that cupboard turned out to be bare.

  “Always seemed like a bloody awful way to make a living,” was Ralas’s expert opinion, and the Yorughan just exchanged awkward looks; throughout the war the Kinslayer’s forces had used mines specifically as bad places you didn’t want to end up in, working people to death even if it meant less actual ore got mined.

  And Dorhambri had always been special. Long before the war, wizards and mage-smiths would send there for iron from certain veins, rich with latent magic a skilled practitioner could bring to life. The Kinslayer had not been blind to the place’s attractions, of course. Half of his nasty little toys had been forged from Dorhambri steel.

  “First we have to get by Hathel Vale, though,” Celestaine knew.

  “What’s so off about it?” Nedlam wanted to know, but Heno leaned close and made a fluttering little gesture with his hands, as of mounting flames, and she nodded in understanding. “Oh, right, that place.”

  Celestaine had wanted to find Catt and Fisher again, to thank and covertly interrogate the pair of them, because, like Kul, she was feeling ungrateful enough to find their presence suspicious. They had vanished away, however, leaving only a few unpaid bar tabs. Standing there listening to one more host gripe about the urbane Cheriveni who had seemed so trustworthy, Celestaine knew she should be on the road again, even though it was past mid-afternoon. Duty called, but for once she decided it could wait until next morning. None of her companions complained; Ralas and Amkulyah were neither of them suited for long walking trips and could use the time off their feet, and the Yorughan, who could have marched forever, were not the complaining type. Or Nedlam wasn’t, anyway. Now that she wasn’t about to be burned at the stake, she was happy enough to sit around in front of the Temple Gate, drinking some sort of paint-stripper wine she had bought and munching on handfuls of roots she had found in the Templars’ evidence chest.

  Heno could complain like a trooper if he wanted. His sarcasm was sharp enough to shave with. He had other things on his mind that night, though, and he and Celestaine ended up naked, tousled, watching the moon. She was propped up against his broad chest, tucked into his arms. He might be a small Yorughan, from a life given over to sorcerous pursuits rather than breaking shieldwalls and storming breaches, but she could still feel the slumbering power in his embrace, enough to crush her if he wanted, and yet utterly under control, a slow and patient strength like a great cat’s.

  “You’re thinking this is a mistake again,” he murmured in her ear.

  “Probably.” She shrugged, making herself more comfortable against his smooth skin. “The Archmandrill would have a fit.”

  The others would never have understood—the Slayers, who had hacked their way through countless Yoggs and Grennishmen and assorted monsters. They accepted Heno and Nedlam’s help to get to the Kinslayer and earn their title, but the two were no more than convenient pawns. They hadn’t seen them as people, though at least they hadn’t seen them as enemies any more. Only Celestaine and Lathenry, who had brokered the deal in the first place from the comfort of the torture benches, had got to know the two of them. Before then, even Celestaine hadn’t thought of the Yorughan as really having minds of their own.

  Lathenry had died, of course, in the fight with the Kinslayer. One more friend she hadn’t been able to save.

  But Heno and Nedlam had impressed her for their courage. Naturally bravery was in no short supply amongst the Slayers, going into the very inner sanctum of the enemy; but theirs was a spirit born of desperation, because it was either kill the Kinslayer or see the conquest of all they knew. The Yorughan could just have gone along with that and not rocked the boat. And yet there had come a moment when Heno had decided he would not be ruled by his demigod master any more, and Nedlam…

  Celestaine was less sure about Ned’s motivations. At first the big Yorughan had just seemed a willing follower whom Heno had recruited. There was more to her than that, of course. She wasn’t the most eloquent and didn’t dwell on her own thoughts, but Celestaine thought that perhaps she just hadn’t liked it; that some sort of rudimentary sense of right and wrong had bloomed even in the Kinslayer’s darkest shadow, and Nedlam had got sick of the interrogations and the blood.

  And after the Kinslayer was dead, his minions had fled the Slayers’ blades and abandoned the fortress of Nydarrow to the conquerors. With the contents of the Kinslayer’s wine cellars on hand, Heno and Celestaine had talked out half the night, comparing their different lives and worlds, flush with the glow of having achieved a great thing between them.

  One thing, as the storytellers said, had led to another. Even as she watched herself seduce and be seduced by him she had been thinking, I will loathe myself in the morning. Yet the morning had come, and she had woken to his slate-grey face with its carved tusks, and she had looked into it and thought, Yes…

  THEY MADE A start early enough that any prurient Templars would be unable to satisfy their curiosity about just what Celestaine and Heno had been about the previous evening. Reclaiming her horse, she managed at last to barter her good name and a little coin into a mount for Ralas. Given his recent history, he had probably not been expecting a thoroughbred destrier, but between her limited funds and the inn’s limited stable, he got a lunnox, like it or lump it. Lunnoxes were seldom seen this far north, and certainly the complaining bleats of the thing suggested it wasn’t enjoying it much. The innkeeper explained he’d ended up with the beast in lieu of payment for room and board, and was obviously keen to get rid of it in exchange for currency more generally accepted. It was a long-legged, goatish thing with yellow eyes and wicked spurs on its hooves, and had anyone ever managed to train them for war, then lunnox cavalry would have ruled the battlefields of the world. Like their goat cousins, however, they were too smart by half for that kind of risky work.

  Ralas stared into the beast’s eyes and it butted
him, not hard, but just to let him know who was boss. After that it consented to let him saddle it, occasionally making bleating sounds that sounded too much like mocking laughter.

  Amkulyah refused a mount. Riding beasts was not something the Aethani did, apparently, and hadn’t he kept up all the way from Bladno? Celestaine didn’t mention that they’d been on boats for most of that way. The little man was so proud sometimes. She decided that she’d keep to his pace, no matter what. Later that day, she turned to find him sitting on Nedlam’s shoulders, leaning down to say something that prompted a guttural laugh. She turned front again, knowing that if he saw her staring he would remember his dignity and get down.

  Two uneventful days on the road, but ahead of them was something that looked like weather, smudged across the sky: a storm that never broke. Celestaine knew what it was, but Ralas had been lost to the Kinslayer before this particular abomination and Kul would have been in the mines when it happened. She didn’t want to ask the Yorughan. There was always a chance they’d have been involved. It wasn’t as though the Kinslayer had set the fires himself, after all.

  That night, when they camped, the southern horizon leapt with light, and Amkulyah said he could see the stark silhouettes of trees against the blaze.

  “Will we need a different route?” he asked her.

  “Our route will skirt it. The road used to go through, but you’d be mad to try that now.”

  “You’d burn,” he agreed.

  “Not just that.”

  “And what do you mean, ‘used to’? How long has it been going?”

  “Three years.” She met his incredulous stare. “Hathel Vale, Kul.”

  She saw him searching his memories. The Aethani had probably flown here to the beautiful glades, the silver brooks, the vivid greens of spring and summer and the riotous autumn hues. People had come from every neighbouring land just to see. Celestaine’s mother had brought her, when she was just a child.