Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The Aethani majordomo took a few moments to digest all that, his face locked in an expression of arch disgust that, Catt considered, was probably so habitual that it just relaxed into it in times of absent contemplation. At last he snapped out some commands in the Yorughan tongue, and half a dozen of the big warriors ran up, staring at the newcomers suspiciously.

  “You say you know the Liberator,” said the Aethani, and to his credit he said it without any hint of irony, surrounded by a mining camp synonymous with slavery. “We’ll see. We’ll pass your names to him, Cat and Fish, and if he doesn’t want to know you, I’m sure you’ll settle for lesser hospitality.”

  Doctor Catt smiled levelly at him. “Catt,” he said, giving his name a Cheriveni flair that made the doubled consonant apparent. “And if you would, dear fellow. Joss won’t want us kept waiting.”

  ANY APPROACH TO Dorhambri was a descent from the hills, which meant that Celestaine’s company had plenty of good vantage points on the fort. That Silvermort wasn’t expecting an attack was clear: the attention of the guards was mostly on the mine and its workers. There was also a convenient amount of bustle down there, plenty of activity around the foundry and the minehead, and the guards constantly crossing back and forth to their own quarters and the fort. When the Kinslayer had set up shop here, he hadn’t been planning for outside assault either. The fort cast an imposing, magically-augmented presence over everything, but it had three gates and two stood open.

  “Either of you see inside of there?” she asked.

  Neither Nedlam or Heno had, but when the Kinslayer ordered a fort built, it wasn’t as though he had architects come up with a unique and exciting plan each time.

  “Count on a lot of it being underneath,” Nedlam pointed out. “He always did make us dig in. Especially where there were mines.”

  “Most of the quarters, cells, stores,” Heno agreed.

  “So can we get into the lower layers from the mines?” Celestaine asked them.

  “Maybe.” Nedlam shrugged. “Why not ask Kul?”

  She blinked at the Yorughan for a moment and realised the Aethani was standing close by her elbow, very pointedly. “I… Yes, of course.”

  Amkulyah’s jaw was tight, and she could see the tension about his eyes, gripping the skin there. “How much did you see, down there?” she asked him.

  “I was there six years, seven?” he said quietly. “What they’ve dug out since, I don’t know, but I knew every corner of that place. They never let us out under the sky, my people. It was an error of the Kinslayer, I think. If we’d seen the sky each night, the sky we couldn’t reach, it would hurt more.” He glared at them, a brief spike of the anger that was normally so well hidden in him. “Yes, there is a way from the mines to beneath the fort, so the guards could control us better. So they could drag us off for beatings and murder us somewhere private. Yes, I can take you there. But there is a door, of course, and there are guards, and there will be guards going into the mine and guards in the tunnels, just like when I was a slave here.”

  “Well...” Celestaine said thoughtfully. One thing had changed since the Kinslayer’s day: Silvermort’s guards were hardly uniform, as the armies of the enemy had been. The only difference between them and their charges was who was standing where, some of the time.

  Ralas had plainly been thinking along the same lines. “Brazen it out?”

  “Brazen it out,” she confirmed. She was going to ask Kul if he was sure he wanted to go back, but he was practically buzzing with anger, and possibly that was his way of dealing with what he was seeing. True, it wasn’t his people under the lash, but there were still whips and hands to wield them.

  “It’s going to be tough on the nerves, if nothing else,” she told them all. “We’re going to just slip round the side of that building and then march for the minehead. Heno and Ned are guards, we three are workers. You look a bit too much like Kinslayer soldiers, the pair of you, but I see a fair amount of war surplus down there. We just have to hope the guards aren’t so close-knit that a couple of unfamiliar faces will spark notice.”

  “What if they do?” Heno asked. “Or what if something else goes wrong? If there’s a password, or you look too healthy and unbeaten to be a slave miner?”

  She opened her mouth to say that they’d deal with that when they came to it, exactly the sort of response that used to horrify her from an officer, but a new voice broke in.

  “You should listen to your Yogg. You can’t just bluster this. Look at them, it’s not an army, where nobody questions the orders. It’s a hundred little personal fiefdoms down there, every bully ruling the space within arm’s reach. And everyone’ll notice a bigger bully like her.” And a thin-faced man wearing the sort of half-armour, half civvies of the guards below was prodding Nedlam’s ample bicep.

  Celestaine stared at him a long time as he stood in the shadow of Nedlam’s raised club, the Yorughan just waiting for her nod to flatten him. At last she said, “Deffo.”

  He looked aggrieved. “How can you always tell?”

  “Your voice.” She hadn’t realised before she said it. “There’s a whine in it I’d know a mile off. What do you want?”

  “I want to help.” He flinched even as he said it, anticipating her response.

  “No ‘sing me songs and make me famous,’ this time?” Ralas asked him.

  “Please,” the Undefeated whispered. “I understand why you cast me off all those times. But let me earn it. Let me help you do whatever you’re doing. I…” He stuttered with self-pity. “I was great once. I fought the Kinslayer. It’s just that, you come into the world with a name like the Undefeated, and you stand there looking at your brother’s blood, silver across the ground where the power’s been sucked from it, and you wonder how long that name will hold. I was afraid. I’ve been afraid longer than you’ve been alive. I’m a thousand years old; it’s a lot to lose. But I’m here now. I want to be that Undefeated again, the one who wasn’t afraid to fight. I’ll help.”

  “How?” Celestaine asked bluntly.

  “I’ll go into the earth with you. And I can show you a place, where to dig. You can cut into the mines without going down that lift, without their questions. With your sword, you can. Let me lead you. Just…”

  “Just tell everyone how wonderful you are, after,” Celestaine finished for him, and then held up a hand against his protestations. “Deffo, if we come out of this with what we’re after, I will sing your damn praises myself.”

  “Not the honour you might think,” Ralas put in. “Not once you’ve heard her voice.” Even so, the look of hope and gratitude in the destitute Guardian’s face was pitiful.

  The Undefeated took them between the hills, skulking from shadow to shadow as though the very sun was trying to find him. He cast left and right like a mongrel looking for a scent. Celestaine couldn’t convince herself he was doing anything useful. Each lost moment just screamed that it was all attention-seeking on his part. When at last he turned and said, “Here, carve it up here, and you’ll come through,” her expression must have dampened his enthusiasm considerably.

  “How can you even know?” she demanded. “Why here? There’s nothing to mark it out.” She indicated the scrubby hillside they were on, which had nothing to recommend it as a secret entrance to the mines.

  His smile was a desperate thing, but still the most genuine thing about him. “You forget,” he almost whispered. “I was a badger, for years. Nothing knows the earth like a badger. Right here, Celestaine.” His shaky hand described a circle in the earth.

  Feeling like a fool, she drew out her sword, noting the scabbard already starting to fray. With a sigh, she drove it to the hilt in the ground, feeling the edge grate on earth and stone, the momentary almost-musical twangs of severed roots. She drew the circle, leaning a little into it, the blade cleaving the rock as though she was moving it through clear honey. It was good for cutting, but not so much for excavation, and when she had the circle cut, nothing happened. Was there
a tunnel a foot lower? How could she know?

  Heno was crouching, though, all but putting his ear to the grass. He murmured, and she saw a film of white energy dance across his face and eyes.

  “Hollow,” he muttered, and then scrambled hurriedly out of the way as Nedlam just came over and stamped hard in the centre of the circle Celestaine had cut. And vanished in a sudden cloud of displaced earth as the ground gave way beneath her.

  They all gathered at the lip of the hole, looking down into the dark. Heno sniffed derisively. “She’s fine.” Amkulyah hesitated a moment, clenching his fists, and then jumped down; landing on Nedlam, if the sound was anything to go by.

  The others descended more cautiously, and Heno conjured a pale little flame to show the interior of a mine gallery, dust thick on the floor. Plainly whatever seam had run here had been mined out long ago.

  “Kul?” Celestaine asked.

  Heno’s light caught in the Aethani’s wide eyes. She heard his shivering breath, but then he nodded and said. “I know it. I know every inch of it. Follow me.”

  JOCIEN SILVERMORT WAS a long-boned man, six inches over Fisher, who was tall for a Cheriveni; considerably more over Doctor Catt. He had broad shoulders, accentuated by the metal pauldrons sewn into the sleeveless coat he wore, with pockets arrayed about the waist. Beneath the coat was some semblance of Arvennir military order uniform, with a curved razor or knife thrust into his belt, the gold and bone hilt ostentatiously on show. He moved his lanky limbs gingerly, a little like a spider does, when it feels something brush its web. His face was the oldest part of him, thin and mean, hollow-cheeked, with a small mouth that always relaxed back into an expression of bitter disappointment no matter what smile he put on. The thatch of fair hair on top might have salvaged the rest a little, but he had the sides shaved to stubble, a dated Arvennir look, and it only accentuated the sourness of the rest of him.

  Across his chest was a half-breastplate displaying a white eight-pointed star. This had been the badge of the Liberator during the war, symbol of the false hope he brought with him. These days he didn’t make his guards wear it. It was his alone.

  “They’re not really my people, not like the old days,” he explained to Catt and Fisher once they’d joined him at his breakfast. He sat at one end of a table that bore far too many scars and stains to have been intended for eating. A whole ham was set out for him, along with bread, honey and raisins, but he didn’t offer a seat to his unexpected guests. Instead he picked at the food slowly, a scrap here, a crumb there, and his left eye examined them thoughtfully. The right was a narrow milky slit under the droop of a lazy lid that twitched and trembled of its own accord. It gave half his face a profoundly suspicious expression. “They don’t… last,” he added lugubriously. “So they don’t get to wear the star.” His speech was slow, full of pregnant pauses as he chose his words, the longest of which seemed to get pushed out sideways and with difficulty from his lips.

  “Do tell,” Catt said politely.

  “When they send me their dregs,” Silvermort went on, “I look them over. I can tell who’s apt for my purposes, who’s better holding the rod than under it.” He dragged at his right cheek, revealing more of the orb beneath: not a living eye but a clouded marble, surely enchanted. “I’m a good judge of character,” he said. With that pronouncement still hanging in the air, he asked, “To what do I owe the honour, doctors?”

  “It’s been a while since we heard from you over in Cinquetann,” Catt said, sitting on the table edge. “We were passing through, on the way to acquiring a few curios, and I said, why don’t we pop in on our old acquaintance Master Silvermort? I’ve always wanted to admire your collection in its full glory.”

  “My collection.” Silvermort said the words as though they had no meaning, pressing down on the table to stand from his barely-touched breakfast. “Doctors…” He stared at them thoughtfully, the marble glinting from beneath his sagging eyelid. “I’m not really a collector like you are. My interests are… specialised.”

  “We’ve noted you had a fondness for Kinslayer memorabilia even before he was cold,” Catt agreed. “While he was very much alive, in fact.”

  “Know your enemy.” Abruptly Silvermort was very close to them, looming over the pair, his narrow mouth wrung into a painful-looking smile. “The world was a different place when he was in it, wouldn’t you say? Dangerous. Interesting. He made… opportunities.”

  He stalked past them to a door, for all the world as if that was the end of the interview and they could make their own way out. As he opened it, though, he paused. “Well?”

  “Well?” Catt queried, somewhat unnerved by the sudden shifts in conversation.

  “You wanted to see what I’ve done with my… collection.” Again that smile. “I’m afraid it won’t compare to your own. I don’t hold much with all that… display. But come on, doctors. After all, I’ve been… working a long time. And you’re educated men. You’ll… appreciate… what I’ve done here.”

  As they joined him in the doorway they heard distant sounds from below, echoing weirdly until they were just formless shrieks and bellows.

  “Good gracious,” Doctor Catt remarked faintly. “Are those your miners?”

  “Oh, no,” Silvermort confirmed. “It’s just that some parts of my collection are… livelier than others. Things of the Kinslayer, doctors. All sorts of… things.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE UPPER GALLERIES where they’d come in were long-abandoned, the low-hanging fruit of the mine, seams picked clean probably long before the Kinslayer had taken the place. From below, echoing weirdly down the tunnels, came the sounds of the active face, the clack and hammer of picks, shouting, the occasional crack of a whip.

  Amkulyah moved surprisingly swiftly through the tunnels, pausing for only a heartbeat at each branch before choosing his route, leading them ever downwards. He was small, of course, and the tunnels here were low. Celestaine had to stoop, desperately scrabbling to follow the sound of his progress, as the only light was the receding morning behind her and a faint radiance of lamps from far ahead. Of the others, Nedlam displayed a surprising turn of speed on all fours, her shoulders brushing the tunnel sides from time to time.

  Celestaine was struck by the change in Kul’s manner. He moved swiftly, but his shoulders were turned in, his head bowed. When he stopped he was very still, so that she almost lost track of him. He didn’t look back at his followers, and sometimes she almost thought he was trying to lose them.

  Then he had paused, and they could all hear the sounds of much more immediate activity ahead, the scuff of feet, a couple of harsh voices speaking Yorughan. Kul seemed to shrink until only a ghost of himself was left, trembling slightly. When Celestaine touched him lightly on the arm, he flinched away, and his wing-limbs thrashed in momentary panic.

  “It’s all right.” She stared into his wide eyes, enough light bleeding here for her to read the shadowy angles of his face. For a moment she thought he didn’t know her, that the memories had just washed away all the months since he regained his freedom. Then he pulled back from her, himself again.

  “Down, down, left, left, down,” he muttered, reading from the map of the tunnels in his head. Then, “But there will be guards. This wasn’t a good plan.”

  The Undefeated pushed his way past Nedlam, hands up as though he were about to strangle the Aethani. “This is the best plan. This is the only plan. You can’t take this away from—”

  “Shut up,” Celestaine hissed at him. She took a deep breath. “Yes, there will be guards. That was always the deal. How often is this gate used—or was used, when you were here?”

  “Not much: twice, three times a day for guards going out, but most went out from the top, to control the miners who got to live up there. Or if there was trouble at the face, they’d come out then, in force.”

  “So replace the guards with your Yoggs,” the Undefeated put in, desperate to please.

  “Because we all look the same, obvi
ously,” Heno put in drily. “Also, what if you need us?”

  At that point advanced planmaking was put on hold as three guards walked into them.

  There were two Yorughan and a big, scarred human, and precisely what they’d been off into the old galleries to do was anyone’s guess, from a crafty smoke to a clandestine threesome. They were just as surprised as the intruders when they rounded a corner and found a bunch of complete strangers arguing about how to infiltrate the fortress.

  It wasn’t the sort of surprise that played out in valuable seconds of complete silence, unfortunately. Just about everyone started yelling, and then one of the Yorughan was pelting back the way they’d come, and the other two, perhaps not seeing just how many intruders there were in the poor light, went wading in.

  Celestaine shifted aside to let Kul get out of the way, but he had made himself scarce already. Instead, she had a sense of blurred motion and a swung club whirred past her face and hit the tunnel wall with splintering force. Her sword still sheathed, her reflex was to kick her human attacker between the legs, hearing a satisfactorily horrified hiss and watching the club fall from nerveless fingers. Then the Yorughan was at her, having gone for a knife as weapon of choice, a good call in the close tunnel. Celestaine fell back from the thrust, heel turning on a loose stone so that she ended up crashing painfully onto her back. The Yorughan jumped on her, blade drawn back, and then obviously saw how many friends she had. He tried to cut her anyway, a hasty slash that barely nicked her cloak, and then scrabbled backwards. Celestaine made to get up and almost got Nedlam’s knee through the back of her head as the big Yorughan woman pounded over her, grabbing the guard’s knife-wrist and bringing it down against the stone floor, loosening his grip on the weapon. A moment later the two of them were struggling, strength against strength and almost completely silent save for the occasional grunt.