Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The human guard had recovered his wits enough to get his club back, bringing it down on Nedlam’s skull to try and free up his friend. Ralas got in the way of that one, taking the blow to his chest with a sickening splintering of bone and going down instantly. Before Celestaine could get her sword clear, the Undefeated jumped on the guard’s shoulders like a monkey, wrenching at his head and biting at his ear. With that distraction, Celestaine had her weapon out and into him, striking low to avoid taking Deffo’s leg off. She tried to wrestle the blade into a swing that would only wound him, but that was a tough call with an edge as sharp as the sword boasted. The blade ended up going into the man’s abused groin, and that was it for him. The sharp crack she heard as he hit the ground was the neck of the guard Nedlam was fighting, Yorughan bones yielding to even greater Yorughan strength.

  “One got away, though,” Ralas wheezed. He was lying on his back and she could see his tunic twitch and shudder as his ribs sorted themselves out.

  “We’d better move fast…” Celestaine stopped. From up ahead came Amkulyah, when she thought he’d bolted for the back. He had his bow in hand and no expression on his face. Ten feet on they found the body of the other Yorughan, an arrow neatly jutting from between skull and spine.

  “They’ll see us from here,” Amkulyah said. “So we just go. Is that all right? We go for the door, through it, and if they have people on the other side, we kill them. We kill them.”

  These aren’t the jailers that kept your people enslaved, Celestaine wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t say they were much different, either, and she couldn’t look Kul in the face and tell him no.

  CATT AND FISHER peered down at the monsters in the pit below, neither of them getting too close to the railing in case Jocien Silvermort turned out to have that sort of sense of humour.

  “Vathesk, then.” Catt managed to regard the three crablike monsters with equanimity as they raised their great claws towards him, pleading for sustenance. There were bones and bits of body trampled about the pit floor, but of course nothing that would have sated the otherworldly creatures.

  Silvermort made a dissatisfied sound. “I thought they’d eat each other,” he said. “I wanted the… strongest Vathesk. But they won’t. No matter how hungry they are.” He shrugged. “I should get rid of them, but… how to go about it?” He turned away, heading further down into the chambers beneath the fortress. Catt caught Fisher’s glance and raised his eyebrows high, to convey his declining impression of their old business associate. Fisher rolled his eyes. I said so, didn’t I?

  “There was that rod, the one with the emerald skull on it,” Silvermort cast over his shoulder as he skulked on through his own halls like a thief. “You got me that, didn’t you?”

  “Enchezzar’s Sceptre of Dominion,” Catt agreed. “You traded us a set of dragon teeth and the Abominable Helm of Temmor the Damned.”

  “I thought it would command the Vathesk,” Silvermort said, mildly disgruntled. “But they ignored me. Only he could make them do things. However he did it, it’s… lost. They’re useless now.”

  “We should find a way to send them home, really,” Catt agreed.

  Silvermort stopped and looked back at him blankly. “Why?”

  Catt smiled by desperate reflex. “Oh, quite, why would anyone bother? But you were going to show us some more of your collection.”

  “I keep telling you,” Silvermort lurched off again. “It’s not a collection, it’s… research.”

  Fisher hissed through his teeth abruptly. They were passing along a corridor lined with doors, most hanging open but plainly intended to be cells as the need arises. Fisher drew a sharp breath in through his teeth, prompting a concerned look from Catt.

  “Do you need your pills again?”

  Fisher just shook his head, but Silvermort was watching, mouth screwed into that twisted smile again. “Yes, it was here. Here I… broke through. Nothing of yours, this. My own researches. My own… acquisitions.”

  “Ah, well, success in one’s investigations is always a joyous thing,” Catt decided. Fisher put a hand on his shoulder and he winced at the pincering pressure of the fingers. “Easy, Fishy.”

  Fisher’s long face said eloquently that this was a bad place to be in, but Doctor Catt just smiled, blithe in the face of any number of ill omens. “I daresay you’ll be showing us what all this was in aid of,” he tried.

  “Yes,” Silvermort said, his stone gaze twitching between them as though trying to pin down something they were hiding. “Yes, the thing all your… baubles were in aid of. You might as well see. You might as well be the first ones. At least you’ll appreciate it.”

  THE GATE TO the fortress hadn’t been locked. It had been guarded by a couple of bored-looking men who were plainly sitting there to ensure no miners went absent to go raid Silvermort’s wine cellar or his pantry. Celestaine and the others had gone into a huddle to discuss the best way to deal with them without raising the alarm, and partway into that, Amkulyah had just shot them both dead, one after the other. One of them had fallen of his chair with a clatter, but apparently those within would require more than that before they came out to investigate.

  “That’s… Well, right,” Celestaine said. Nedlam, always the pragmatist, went and got the bodies and hauled them off into the upper galleries where they might not be found for a while.

  Kul was looking a little frightened at his own actions, but plainly ready to push right back if Celestaine called him on them. She had no idea what kind of a tangled snarl his thoughts were in, right then. Should have left him behind. But then they’d be wandering lost through the mines. And if this had been the war, and they’d been the minions of the Kinslayer, she’d have killed them without a thought, she knew. And Heno was standing at her shoulder, proof positive that those minions had a right to life and freedom, same as everyone else. So why should Silvermort’s thugs, complicit here in the slave labour of so many, warrant greater consideration?

  But the war’s over, she tried to tell herself, except that some wars are never over.

  Nedlam came back and they slipped into the fortress, closing the door behind them.

  Amkulyah’s role as guide ended there, of course; he hadn’t had much of a chance to wander the Kinslayer’s actual stronghold. The Yorughan had confirmed there would be plenty of business belowground, as per their former master’s standard building strategy, and she was looking at the evidence of that now. Distant sounds echoed from above, where presumably Silvermort’s staff were keeping parts of the fortress habitable for his use. So would he be keeping his precious treasures up there to be dusted by the underfootman? Probably not. Not when the Kinslayer’s design had provided him with a whole realm of cells and chambers beneath.

  That was her logic, anyway, and she was uncomfortably aware that it was untested. Rather than just charge off, she had a hurried conference of whispers with the others, which Heno ended definitively by saying, “I smell magic. Strong magic, from below. Maybe this crown, maybe not, but something touched by the Reck—the Kinslayer. Something of his.”

  “Can you lead us from here?”

  He shrugged. “Magic doesn’t care about where the doors or the stairs are, but I can try.”

  They hunted along the level they were on, looking for stairs. In some rooms they saw guards sleeping—or, once, a bunch of them raucously gambling, paying no attention whatsoever. Soon they were plainly beyond any guard, entering a dimmer realm where the walls echoed to monstrous, distant sounds that brought shivers of remembrance to Celestaine. What has he got down here? Was that a Vathesk? Then Heno sniffed at the air and took a sharp turn, heading down a line of thankfully unoccupied cells. Probably there were few situations that would result in Silvermort imprisoning one of his charges rather than simply having them killed.

  Heno was slowing, though, towards the corridor’s end. Celestaine could see what looked like steps down at the end, and had been putting on a burst of speed. He dragged at her shoulder, though, and
soon they had dawdled almost to a stop.

  “What?” she demanded, though her own feeble sense for magic was prickling the hairs of her neck.

  “You don’t feel it?” Heno seldom deigned to look worried, but something was eating at him now. “There’s power here, or the echo of it, but not power I know…” He cast about, then recoiled from a nearby cell. “What’s been done here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your Silvermort. He’s a magician?”

  “Of sorts. Not a book-learning magician, but he was always good with what he picked up.”

  “He’s picked up a lot,” Heno murmured. He had his staff extended as though about to wake a bear with it, nudging open one of the cell doors. “What…?”

  At first glance it was just another windowless little room, and Celestaine’s eyes told her she was seeing a strange play of shadows from the low corridor lamps. The lamplight was a sullen amber, though, while the gleaming shapes cast across the cell walls were silvery, and didn’t make sense until she tilted her head and they abruptly became a great argent splatter across one wall. Attempts had been made to scrape it off, but the smear remained, a chaotic spatter that reminded her of nothing more than…

  “Blood…?” But what bleeds silver?

  The Undefeated drew in a ragged breath. He was shaking, his hands half-up as if to fend something off. He gaped at her baffled look. “You can’t…? How can you not know? Even the Yogg understands what happened here. How come you can’t even feel it?”

  “Someone tell me what’s going on,” Celestaine snapped.

  “Power,” Heno said. “A great release of power, somehow. Contained, but enough of it got loose to taint this place for a hundred years.” He scowled. “I should recognise it.”

  “You should,” the Undefeated agreed, prodding at him with a trembling finger. “You’re steeped in this blood, all your kind are. It made your master what he was.”

  “Deffo, just tell me,” Celestaine ordered. “What is this white stuff?”

  He looked as though he might vanish away at any minute, his new-found courage dangling by a thread. “That’s our blood. The blood of the divine,” he moaned. “They killed one of us here, oh, yes they did. Opened him up and let the godhead flood out. The Lightbearer, it was. I can feel the echo of him. Oh, you poor bastard, to end up here.”

  “The Lightbearer died in Cinquetann,” Celestaine told him.

  “He fell there. They wounded him gravely. I thought he’d died,” agreed the Undefeated. “But no, they must have taken him. The Kinslayer must have done such things to him that… but he ended up here, still living, somehow. And someone finished the job. Not too long ago, either.”

  “Silvermort,” Ralas put in. “Celest, this is sounding worse and worse.”

  “You want to turn back?” she asked him.

  “Me? No, but I’ve got less to lose than the rest of you.”

  “I STARTED SMALL, did you know?” Silvermort called back to them as they descended another flight of steps. Doctor Catt was wondering how far the Kinslayer had tunnelled into the earth here for his own chambers. It seemed otiose to do so when there was a perfectly good mine next door. He made an enquiring noise to keep the conversation going, while checking that his protective amulet, his walking stick and various other magical gewgaws were to hand, should this business take an untoward turn.

  “Banditry, protection,” Jocien continued. “We’d roll up and tell some village there were raiders on the way, and they could pay us to protect them. Sometimes there were. Sometimes the raiders… were us. But small beer, doctors. The war changed everything. Suddenly everyone would pay… everything for our protection. I was the Liberator. And when you’re fighting on the side of right against the ultimate darkness, you can take… everything, doctors. It was a golden age, when the war was on. Except towards the end, when our side started winning battles, and nobody needed the Liberator and his friends. And some of the other heroes started… asking questions. They’ll come for me, you know.” He had stopped at a door and was squinting back at them, as though suspecting them of being in the pay of heroes.

  “Fancy that,” Doctor Catt said pleasantly. Beside him, Fisher was fidgety and ill at ease, had been ever since the cell bay.

  “Sooner or later they’d remember old Jocien,” Silvermort told them with a fond smile. “All my old comrades. The live ones, anyway. Peace time’s no use to me, doctors. I need… conflict, chaos. The Kinslayer gave me the best years of my life. Even before they killed him, I could see that if he went, I’d miss him.”

  “That’s a novel viewpoint,” Catt noted politely.

  Silvermort back-kicked the door open and then spun on his heel to march through. “The magic helped with the banditry, at the start,” he explained, turning abruptly back to hold the door for them as though he was a servant, even sweeping a mocking bow. “I never had the sort of… erudition you can boast, doctors, but I had a knack for spellcraft. I could always see how to make things work, how they fit together. And you were so very kind. You got me some… choice morsels, in exchange for some of the war loot. You made it all possible, really.”

  The room beyond was a long hall, cluttered with alchemical apparatus and magical engines, some stolen, some apparently roughly assembled by Silvermort or his people. On either side, long galleries overlooked the floor, suggesting that the room had been made for some other purpose than the tangled laboratory it had been pressed into service as. There was a half-dozen of Jocien’s people here, and they all bore the Liberator’s star emblem somewhere on their person. Three were human, one was a dwarfish Grennishman with four skinny arms, and the remaining two were Yorughan. Not just your regular kind either, Catt noted without enthusiasm; they wore the white edged greatcoats of the Heart Takers, though he guessed they would be less congenial than Celestaine’s companion.

  “I had the idea towards the end of the war.” Silvermort turned with a flourish, sweeping up from a bench a bejewelled mace Catt identified as Enchezzar’s Sceptre of Dominion, formerly of his stock in trade. “But I ran into a dead end. I didn’t have the power and I… didn’t have the focus. All just dead meat without that, of course. Except you found me one very particular rarity, and while I was in Cinquetann I did some shopping. I’d heard from some of the Kinslayer’s people about a certain treasure still locked up beneath the town. A certain injured but still-just-living treasure the Kinslayer had been… saving. And now I’m ready, thanks to you. And here you are in time to see it all… come to fruition. And that’s convenient, because you’re smart enough to put the pieces together when the news gets out. I’d only have had to send people to kill you, and that would be… tiresome, very tiresome.”

  Catt and Fisher exchanged looks. It was hardly the first time they’d been in this situation, although Catt’s vestigial sense for magic was sending all sorts of worrying signals.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, as calmly as could be, “you’re obviously itching to enact the grand reveal. Which, precisely, was the key trinket we provided, and what does it allow you to accomplish?”

  ON THE GALLERY above, Celestaine and her company looked down on the unfolding drama,

  “See a crown anywhere?” she murmured to Amkulyah, who had the best eyes.

  He shook his head, but nodded to a great table where some shape lay, like a huge corpse, beneath a heavy velvet curtain. One foot was protruding, clad in mail. Celestaine thought about the big man who had apparently gone from place to place with their quarry. Did Silvermire kill him and take the crown? Did he leave the clue because he didn’t trust Jocien, and wanted to be avenged? It didn’t ring true. But there could be a crown beneath the shroud.

  Heno was looking the two Heart Takers over. At her look he shook his head slightly. “The bigger one’s Tarraki. She got sent all over for the serious torturing. Specialist in bodies and how to break them. The other I don’t know, but he looks low rank; she’s the big threat.”

  “The Grennishman was in the mi
nes before,” Kul breathed. “He’s a magician. He used to sniff out seams for us to dig.”

  “He’s yours, then,” Celestaine decided. “We’re ready to go over the rail?” She glanced around to find the Undefeated hanging back, his eyes wide.

  “This is a bad place,” he whispered. “We need to leave now. Something terrible’s here.”

  “Pipe down,” Nedlam hissed. “I want to hear. He’s about to show his thing.”

  Celestaine, who’d lost track of the conversation between Silvermort and the inexplicably present Doctor Catt, looked over the rail, half-expecting Jocien to be unbuckling his belt. Instead, Silvermort was gesturing to the covered corpse.

  “You remember what you got me, that little keepsake from Nydarrow?” he asked Catt. “They burned the rest, I was… so disappointed to find out, but you gave me a hand with my collection anyway.”

  “Oh, dear,” Catt said. “Dear me, that was terrible. Beneath you.”

  “What?” Ralas wondered, but Celestaine suddenly had a very ill feeling about what Silvermort meant. Nydarrow, of unfond memory: the Kinslayer’s home fortress, where she had teamed up with Ned and Heno, where she had… Her hand tightened on her sword grip.

  Silvermort gestured with the wand he had, and the shrouded figure sat up abruptly, the curtain sloughing off it. Revealed was an armoured form as large as Nedlam, but weirdly piecemeal, no two parts of it quite matching. One arm was the great chitinous pincer of a Vathesk. The other was Yorughan, but the hand stitched to its wrist was pale, outsize but more human save for its curved nails. She knew it instantly.

  The figure swung its metal-clad legs from the bench and stood, the darkness within its helm directed squarely at Silvermort. Abruptly, a pair of membranous wings erupted from its back, dramatic but pointless, for it was far too heavy to use them. The Aethani they had been cut from would have been a quarter of the thing’s size.