darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,2
upright in my bed at the Roc and Diamond gasping for air.
What just happened? Triss spoke into my mind, his mental voice sounding muzzy and confused as though he were rising up from a deep and enchanted sleep. I had the strangest dream. . . .
“Aral?” It was Siri, waking beside me. “What . . .” Her voice trailed off as she touched the skin over my heart.
I looked down. Clearly visible in the late-morning light was a mark on my chest—like an old burn scar. It took the shape of a six-fingered hand.
I speak to the dead. My fallen brethren. The people I have killed unjustly whose forgiveness I beg in the small hours of the night. Most of all, my goddess. Usually, they don’t answer me back.
I think it’s better that way.
* * *
The Roc and Diamond was a typical example of architecture in the city of Wall. The ground floor was sixteen feet wide and sixty feet long, its shape determined by the nature of the gigantic magical ward that separated the lands of the Sylvani Empire from the human kingdoms to the north. The ward took the shape of a wall eight feet tall and eight feet wide, enclosing and confining the magics of the First within a perfect half circle that started and ended on the shore of the great eastern ocean. It was thousands of miles long and served as the only street of the strangest city in the world—a city a thousand miles long and forty feet wide.
The gods had created the wall as a sort of prison for the First, and they had endowed it with certain magical properties. Nothing could be built upon or remain atop the wall for any length of time. Stand still on the wall and you would find yourself slowly and inexorably sliding toward the nearest edge. Nothing could breach or harm the wall. For exactly sixteen feet on either side, the ground was as hard as granite, perfect footing for buildings, and the foundation of the city. For another hundred yards beyond that the ground looked normal but acted more like slow quicksand. Holes filled themselves in. Trees of any size couldn’t root properly and quickly fell over. And any attempt at erecting a building met with a similar fate. They called it the Fallows.
The wall was a bizarre place to build a city, but that interface between the human lands and the older Sylvani Empire provided opportunities that could be found nowhere else in the world.
My childhood mentor, Kelos Deathwalker, had once quoted a scrap of an ancient lay describing the place, and now that I was temporarily living on the wall, it came back to me often: “A stone snake five thousand miles long coils its way around the empire, a city riding on its back. Within is the oldest and mightiest civilization in the world, a dreaming land of decadence and corruption ruled over by ancient immortals fallen from grace. Beautiful and terrible they were in the power of their youth, and beautiful and terrible they remain, though they are ruined now and their strength broken—a decayed remnant of the world that was, bound forever within a wall built by the gods.”
The requirements of magic kept the city from growing out into the Fallows or over the wall, and the crowding of centuries prevented much expansion side to side. That meant that the more successful buildings went up. The Roc was no exception, with a number of towers reaching as high as six or seven stories—more than that made the edifice vulnerable to tipping in the wind, for there was no way to fasten the building to its footing.
The eight of us had taken rooms in the tallest of the towers while we sorted out what happened next. Four of us were human and Blades once; me, Siri, Faran, and Kelos the Traitor. Four were Shades. Triss, Kyrissa, Ssithra, and Malthiss. The first and most pressing question we had to deal with was the matter of Kelos.
What to do with the traitor who had betrayed the Temple of Namara to the Son of Heaven? It seemed a simple enough question to answer. The man certainly deserved to die, and there wasn’t one of us who didn’t want to kill him. But he was stuffed full of secrets, secrets that we might desperately need in the days to come. Especially if we decided to move against Heaven’s Son.