Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Our lot were about to push back like you wouldn’t believe,” Nedlam agreed around a mouthful of root. “Lucky you met us two, eh?”

  “So why didn’t you?” Celestaine asked. “Even with the Kinslayer dead?” The question had always been there, in the back of her mind.

  Nedlam just shrugged. Command decisions had never been her thing.

  “The Kinslayer didn’t delegate,” Heno suggested. “He never had a second in command. He never planned for what would happen when he was gone. He was an immortal demigod, he never looked for a world that didn’t include him. So: no Kinslayer, you just have a rabble of generals, Heart Takers and big monsters, and suddenly nobody knows what the big plan was, or who gives the orders. Just as well your Silvermort never got his replacement on the road. He might have done better than his wildest dreams.”

  With that cheery thought hanging over them, the Templar Hegumen returned.

  “You,” she said. “You’re Celestaine of Fernreame?”

  Celestaine shrugged. “None other.”

  “Then come with me.”

  Two other burly Templars had come in with her, and Celestaine didn’t much fancy the idea. Still, she had her sword, and that was a great equalizer.

  “If they try anything with us, you’ll hear it,” Heno pointed out. Celestaine canvassed the expressions of the others. Ralas shrugged and waved her on. Amkulyah just stared at everything angrily, by now entirely fed up of the intraspecies squabbles of humans.

  “Fine.” Celestaine gestured for the Templars to lead on, fully expecting to get frog-marched from the tent. Instead the Hegumen just backed out and left her to follow.

  She got another look at the camp on her way over to the wooden fort, with the uncomfortable sense that most of the camp was looking back at her. The previous bustle had turned into a kind of unnerving expectation. So has someone gone to get the wood for the bonfire, or what?

  She was expecting… she wasn’t sure what. The fort didn’t look like it would have a dungeon, so maybe just some Spartan office like the Governor’s at Ilkand. Instead the Hegumen just started climbing stairs until they ended up on the roof, looking out over the palisade and into the craggy, barren terrain of the Unredeemed Lands. They weren’t alone there, either. There was a squat, jowly man with the insignia of the Lion’s Tooth engraved onto a fine breastplate—probably a chapter Constable at the very least—and there was a lean robed Tzarkoman fidgeting with a wooden skull mask, who Celestaine guessed was a Grave-Judge or some other of their complex religious hierarchy. His forehead was tattooed with script that probably explained exactly who he was, if you were also a Tzarkoman priest and could read their archaic glyphs. Beside him, and miraculously not trying to kill him, was a middle-aged woman with blue scales for skin, a Dragon-speaker from the Ystachi and a long way from home. Next to her, making the wooden boards creak, she saw a huge Oerni, every bit a match for Nedlam in bulk but barefoot and wearing a simple robe, one of their Wayfarer-priests whose travels from place to place were a form of religious observance.

  “So…” she said. If the world was trying to get her burned for heresy, it had obviously upped its game after last time. Apparently the Ilkand Temple on its own just wasn’t equal to the task. She actually caught herself looking around for a few vengeful Guardians just to complete the picture.

  The Templar Hegumen, whom everyone seemed to be deferring to, was in no hurry to start the witch-hunt. She was looking out over the land ruined by the Kinslayer—all that scorched earth, the bare rocks, the canyon and cracks riven through into uncertain depths. Here and there, great tangled stretches of forest had grown up, some close to the palisade: the trees twisted and serpentine, branches interlocked to bar all sunlight from the labyrinth of trunks beneath. Elsewhere, toxic-looking smoke issued from vents and sinkholes, casting a twilight gloom where morning should have broken. Not hard to see why nobody had been anxious to redeem these lands. And yet this great expanse of poison and desolation, warped both by the Kinslayer’s actions and by his sheer continued presence during the war, this was where the remnants of his strength were most strongly concentrated. There were Yorughan armies bivouacked in there that might still be holding out for a second coming. There were dragons and twisted fire-eyed wolves and gigantic serpents, and all the other refuse of the Kinslayer’s experimental whims. There were Vathesk and Umberwyrms and walking dead raised by Tzarcoman collaborators. There were nests of Grennishmen and Silanti and a half-dozen other distinct races that had been dragged beneath the earth by the Kinslayer and made into his servants.

  And here were the defenders of the free world, holding the line against anything that might try to escape that blasted territory, and no doubt making incursions of their own to shed some enemy blood.

  And here was Celestaine, waltzing into their camp in the company of a pair of Yorughan.

  And yet nobody laid hands on her and the silence stretched on, all those august religious and secular personages just staring at her with expressions she couldn’t quite read, until she kicked at the wooden stakes of the wall and cleared her throat and said, “Well, look, we were hoping to…”

  “You were there,” said the Hegumen, turning to her at last. Celestaine braced herself for accusation, but instead the woman’s face was weirdly naked and vulnerable, not the look she expected from a battle-hardened Templar. “At the Ilkand Temple.”

  I was supposed to get burned to death there, so, yes, your lot did insist on my presence, was what Celestaine did not say. Instead she just nodded. Still, a reprise of that judicial outcome was looming large in her mind, and so she was braced to go over the rail and down the wall if absolutely necessary. It wasn’t something she’d been called on to do before, but she reckoned, if the assembled clergy started lighting torches, that would be a good time to learn.

  “We had a messenger from Ilkand. Just two days ago, he came.” The Hegumen was trembling, ever so slightly. “He was only passing on words, though. He hadn’t been there. And we’ve been here for two years now, fighting the Kinslayer, fighting what he left behind, reclaiming with the sword what was taken with the sword.”

  Celestaine recognised a line of doctrine when she heard it. “Vengeance,” she said flatly.

  “Because the Temple was crying for it,” the Hegumen agreed. All the others there, all those middling war-clergy of different, contradictory sects and traditions, they were eerily silent, listening, letting the Ilkand Temple take the lead in whatever was going on here.

  And then that silence spread, because the Hegumen was obviously waiting for something that Celestaine couldn’t identify. The Oerni Wayfarer shifted his big feet, as though he’d already been in one place too long, and the Tzarkomen put his mask to his face, as though Celestaine might look different viewed through the eyeholes, but nobody spoke until the rising quiet drew the next words from the Hegumen with wires.

  “They said the gods spoke at Ilkand,” she said, her voice a shivering whisper.

  Oh. “Um.” Oh gods, it’s that, is it? “Well…”

  Because Celestaine hadn’t ever had much time for the gods and temples. It wasn’t a Forinthi thing—in Forinth being self-sufficient was a virtue and prayers to their little household gods and spirits mostly amounted to requesting that they just keep out of the way. Most of the small kingdoms between Arven and Varra were suspicious of anyone with a divine mandate telling them to change their ways. “The Gods made us this way for a reason,” was a frequent comeback to travelling preachers who grew too insistent. But of course the Tzarkomen had lived for centuries governed by an impenetrable pantheon of gods, which nominally included everyone else’s gods as well as quite a few whose voices had only been heard in Tzarkand. The Templars had never been such a power in Ilkand as they now were, but they were driven by the gods’ demands for justice and reprisal against the wicked. The Arvennir considered themselves the gods’ chosen, as part of their general tradition of being better than everyone else. And everyone knew of the Guardians, the g
ods’ instruments to guide and protect their mortal creations. Though most seemed to have fallen from the path they had been set on, in the thousand years since they were set to work, even Celestaine would cheer the return of the Wanderer to the heavens.

  And the gods had gone silent. The Kinslayer had done some great wrong that even Heno couldn’t start to guess at, and the voices of the gods had ceased to sound. No statues grated out prophecy, no illuminating dreams came to high priests, no shimmering radiance lit on altars and told in bell-like tones the fates of kings.

  To Celestaine, facing the onrushing tide of Yorughan, it had been just one damned thing among many; to many others, it had been the deathblow of their world. She had never stopped to consider just how much personal courage it must have taken, to keep the faithful fighting once their gods had been taken from them.

  And now here were all these priests, who were also battle-weary soldiers, here at the edge of the free lands, still fighting some revenant war against the Kinslayer’s hosts, and word had come to them that…

  Well, what do I say? Do I tell them about Catt and Fisher, and how they’re mercurial bastards who probably cooked the whole thing up as a joke? Because it was plain nobody here was laughing. Celestaine had thought the Ilkand Temple would probably shake itself and get over the whole affair, that it would be burning-people-business as usual for the Archimandrite by the time he’d finished next morning’s breakfast. She wondered just what word had come to this nameless little outpost.

  “There was a relic,” she said carefully, feeling each word she spoke grow huge and full of portent in their ears. “The skull of…” And she couldn’t even remember, or particularly remember why whosesoever’s skull it was had been important. “A skull,” she substituted lamely. “The Archi”—the word mandrill hovered perilously on her tongue, but she recovered—“…mandrite held it, and he heard the gods. He said so, and… I suppose he should know. Just, you know, faintly.” I am doing a horrible job of this. She felt she should throw her arms out wide and lead them all in prayer, get them dancing to her music, get gifts and provisions and a guide to the Unredeemed lands, barter her prophecy into fleecing them for all they were worth. She didn’t have it in her, though. She wasn’t Jocien Silvermort to coast on a tide of fake liberation. “So yes, I was there.” Front row seat, in fact. “Nobody else heard what he heard, but I saw how it affected him. He believed it. And…” And now I’m on dangerous ground because do I tell them that I believe him, because the gods were telling him the flat out opposite of what he’d wanted to do, and he went with it? That was what had been persuasive to her. If he’d said the gods were howling for more vengeance, that could just have been a man listening to the echoes inside his own skull, as far as she was concerned. It was the change in him that had been the miracle. But here goes. “The message of the gods was for mercy.” The combined weight of their solemn regard was getting to her, and she just blurted out, “Look, we were about to be executed, me and my friends. For no good reason, frankly, but the fact that two of us were Yorughan didn’t help. And then… gods. And we were freed, and… well, I don’t know how things went after that, because frankly we got the hell out of Ilkand. But it looked like your man the Archimandrite’s world got turned upside down. Mercy, he said. Peace. Tolerance.” She was mortified to realise she couldn’t actually remember the gods’ exact words, which was something she really should have made an effort with.

  “Some of us left, when the word came through,” the Hegumen said. “A whole detachment marched off to Ilkand to ask… to ask, What? To ask, did they know we had been doing our best to bring divine vengeance to the creatures of the Unredeemed Lands? And did that mean we’d been wrong, all this time? I got a message yesterday from the Termaghent phalanstery denouncing the Ilkand Temple. Already. Saying it was lies spread by the Kinslayer’s heir. But they’ve never believed that there isn’t a leader still behind what’s left of the enemy.”

  “They’re fools,” said the Oerni in a rich, deep voice. Nobody seemed to strongly disagree.

  “Celestaine of Fernreame,” said the Templar. “My name is Kait Esterra Hegumen. The Archimandrite of the Temple is my uncle.”

  Celestaine had to bite down on offering her commiserations, contenting herself with nodding.

  “I know my uncle,” Kait continued. “He is a hard man. ‘Mercy’ is not a word he would use in connection with doctrine. He’s not a bad man. He has never taken pleasure in bringing pain or hardship, but he has done so because that was the word of the gods. Now I have a message from him saying that the gods decree mercy. Saying that”—and her voice shook, and the Arvennir chapter officer put a hand on her shoulder to steady her— “…that it may be the last word the gods ever have for us. And you have confirmed the message. You, who slew the Kinslayer and now travel with his creatures.”

  Celestaine nodded uncertainly. “Well, then, that’s… Glad I could be of service…?” She wasn’t entirely sure that this wasn’t going to turn into blood and vengeance any moment. The whole encounter was profoundly unnerving her.

  “We need your help,” Kait told her.

  I’m already helping someone. Can you wait, and maybe I’ll get round to you…? But help was a two-way street, and the scouts here must have a good idea of what went on across the border, where Celestaine needed to go. “What, then?”

  “We have a whole camp of very confused soldiers here, who don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing or what is right,” Kait told her. “I think most of them want to believe the news from Ilkand. Any message from the gods is better than none, and a message that says something other than, Kill until they kill you back is going to be well received. Because we have been attacking the enemy, and defending ourselves from the enemy, for two solid years without much changing—even the Kinslayer’s death didn’t make things much better. They haven’t just rushed out en masse and overwhelmed us, broken our walls and tortured us all to death; but they haven’t gone away, either. It’s just been attrition ever since the war ended. So I want you to go stand up and talk to them, talk to all of our people, tell them what you saw. Tell them it’s true.”

  “That’s not something I’m good at,” Celestaine said. The thought brought her out in a cold sweat. “I was never a speeches sort of person. I tended just to do things, and if people followed my lead, well, that was their look-out.”

  “You were there when the gods spoke,” Kait said with ineluctable logic. “Who else can do it? Please.”

  Who else? For a moment, ridiculously, she was thinking of Heno, because he had such a smooth, persuasive voice when he wanted something. But of course, there was a better choice.

  “I can’t do it,” she told them all. “But I know who can, if he agrees to it. And in return you have to help us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  RALAS SPOKE LIKE a man who wasn’t in constant pain from injuries that would never heal. His strong, confident voice rang out across the palisaded compound and beyond, using all the tricks of performance a professional bard could muster. He told them it true, not as some grand embellished saga, but every word brimming with sincerity. He made it simple and compelling. He spoke to hearts. Celestaine knew for a fact that Ralas had been no more invested in the wisdom of the gods than she, and his treatment at the hands of a demigod had not left him any more enamoured of the divine, but he knew what was expected of him. Not rabble-rousing slogans to cover an emptiness, but a plain, precise account of what had gone down in Ilkand. Celestaine would remember the event forever as Ralas had told it, not as she herself had experienced it. His version was better, even though he was striving for accuracy, neither overselling the miraculous nor playing it down.

  And he was brief, keeping it short enough that nobody had a chance to shuffle or think of awkward questions. Afterwards, he strode from the makeshift stage the Templars had erected and collapsed, shaking. Celestaine put a hand to his shoulder and he winced before covering it with her own.

  “Don’t make me
do that again,” he said.

  “I didn’t make you,” she pointed out. “I asked.”

  He opened one eye and fixed it on her. “And how was I supposed to say no, eh?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved away the apology. “I should be glad that I can still do it when I want to,” he admitted. “So, what happens now?”

  She looked around: Heno, Ned and Kul were leaning in for the answer to that question.

  “Now we leave these walls and go where the monsters are,” she told them. “And because of that speech, hopefully we do it with some help from these people. They’ve been making forays into the land beyond here for a while. They know the dangers and they might have word of our man. And they have some other work they might want help with.”

  “Of course they do,” said Ralas tiredly.

  “Because it’s something they’re not good at, and it’s something we’re invested in. It’s something we’ve seen done, in bits and pieces. It’s something we’ve done ourselves.” She looked at Heno in particular because his expression suggested he was being stubborn and not wanting to go where she was leading. “They want to see what the others think about the Temple’s new message. It takes two to make peace, and it’s way more difficult than fighting, most of the time, but Kait wants us there when they offer the spring wheat.”

  “When they do what?” Heno frowned.

  “Like a peace offering,” she clarified, realising that, of all the Forinthi idioms, the Yorughan were probably least familiar with that one. For that matter, the Forinthi themselves didn’t have much use for it, pugnacious as her people generally were.

  “Because of us two?” he asked, indicating himself and Nedlam.

  Celestaine shrugged. “I know it’s not like you have some magic sigil of the Kinslayer that will immediately get anything of his to sit up and take orders from you. I know that even other Yorughan aren’t just going to do what you say, let alone anything else. But anyone on the far side of that wall is most definitely going to be leery of listening to the humans they’ve been fighting for the last however many years. Having some Yorughan faces in the mix can only help.”