Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They left their mounts with the Templars, since the ground ahead would be too rocky for Celestaine’s horse, too barren to feed even the lunnox. They could have cut through the forest and made shorter time, but they all reckoned that would be testing the goodwill of the Kelicerati too much, not to mention any other nasty surprises that benighted place might be harbouring. As it was, even skirting the forest’s verge, they were attacked. A winged amphibian-looking monster burst from the trees, half leaping, half flapping towards them, frog eyes bulging wide as though it was trying to catch up with them to deliver an urgent message. If it hadn’t been bigger than a horse, its vast gaping maw lined with ranks of hooked teeth, it would have been risible. As it was, Amkulyah put three arrows in it without finding a sensitive spot, and Heno’s magic just feathered off its slimy hide, leaving little more than ice trails. Nedlam got a solid blow into its goggling face, though, leaving Celestaine to open it up from lips to legs as it tried to vault her. None of them had ever seen such a beast before, and the consensus was that they hoped it was one of a kind.

  Celestaine re-sheathed her sword carefully. She had bound the scabbard up as best she could, but it wouldn’t last long, and the nearest supply of dragonskin was still occupied by a dragon.

  They camped at the far end of the forest, hidden in a hollow and keeping double watch. Aside from the folio-sized moths that arrived for fatal liaisons with their fire, nothing came from the trees to trouble them. Ahead, the land fell away, dry and cracked, as though the forest had drawn all the moisture to itself. Desert didn’t mean deserted, of course: at dusk they had seen big domed mounds crawling across the rugged, rocky terrain like great horseshoe crabs. They were made-things, Heno said, bred to scavenge battlefields and ruins for anything of use. Now they were just roaming wild, no doubt dropping their meagre gains in some cache somewhere, waiting for a master that would never return. He was in an odd mood that night. Celestaine was fond of him, but even she would admit that he was all sharp edges, full of derisive wit and sharp words for all of the world outside his immediate fellowship, and sometimes even for them. This night, though, he had given in to a strange melancholy new to him.

  “Talk to me,” she suggested, sitting next to him to share his watch. He was looking out over those dry lands, streaked by the moon and mottled by the rolling shadows of clouds.

  “These things…” He gestured vaguely, encompassing all the world. “Dragons, monsters, the Kelicerati, the Kinslayer’s constructs and mistakes. Us.”

  “You’re not like them,” she said loyally.

  “Who knows what we would have been, if not for him? If the gods had taken notice of us and sent Guardians amongst us, way back then. We fell under the Kinslayer’s sway because he was still a thing of the gods, and so he was better than nothing. All of us—Yorughan, Grennish, Silanti—we were the people the gods never got around to. The Guardians infest your human histories like lice.” His tone turned abruptly savage. “They came to the Aethani and taught them to fly, so they tell it. They walked the roads with the Oerni, they brought boatbuilding to the Shelliac, even. But for us, nothing. And we felt it. Long before the Kinslayer took advantage, we were there to be taken advantage of. The children nobody wanted.”

  Celestaine said nothing, keeping a weather eye on the darkness of the forest but the rest of her mind listening.

  “We lost wars, back in those days. We lost lands. We lost our history, too. Where were our ancestral homes before we ended up in the pits of the earth? We don’t even know. But that meant that anywhere could be ours, when we came back. Find a place you like the look of, during the invasion? Well, then, that’s your ancient home from before time. We could tell ourselves it was all ours, once.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “Of course not, but plenty fooled themselves into thinking it, because it was better than knowing nowhere was. And the Kinslayer made us strong, if only because he made sure the weak all died. He honed us, sharpened us by paring away the bluntness. He gave us monsters as allies. He taught us that, so long as we feared him, the rest of the world would fear us. And he made us proud to be ourselves. Maybe not the Grennish—I mean, who would be proud to be a Grennishman? But we were the Yorughan, the war-makers. He didn’t mean to, but he made us feel worth something, for the first time in a long time. He took monsters and horrors and made-things and us, and he made us part of something. It was good.”

  He looked at her, searching for condemnation, but she was nodding slowly. “And you turned on him.”

  “And I don’t regret it, because the thing we were part of was a lie. He’d have destroyed us, when we’d destroyed you. He killed any of us who got ideas, who asked questions. I’m lucky I worked that out before opening my mouth once too often. But…”

  “You miss it.”

  “Even knowing it was a lie, I miss the lie. It was a good lie. And now it’s gone. All the monsters and prodigies will die off, or else they’ll become… less. Make accommodations, fit into your world, because we’ll never have one of our own. Your people should be ready for those who would rather fight to the death, because there’s still some pride in that, rather than ending up pulling some human farmer’s haycart or carrying a hod to build your fine houses.”

  She wanted to say that it wouldn’t be like that, but how could she? She didn’t know, and she reckoned Heno had a better grasp of these things than she did.

  “What I can do, I’ll do,” was all she could vow.

  “Waste of your talents, really,” and that was more the Heno she knew. He didn’t speak of it again, but she saw the shadow of those thoughts behind his eyes more than once as they travelled.

  That morning, there was another at their fire. What shape he had crept up in, Celestaine couldn’t guess, but there was the wretched form of the Undefeated making a fist of making breakfast before Ralas’s incredulous stare. Celestaine awoke to his plaintive voice as he tried to outline some grand saga, some great list of lies and omissions that would turn his sojourn as a badger for the war’s duration into some grand struggle between good and evil.

  “Everyone knows the Kinslayer came out of the earth,” the Undefeated argued. “Who knows the earth better than a badger?” He didn’t argue with any force, just whined away with an implacable endurance.

  She sat up, startling him into silence. “Enough from you, Deffo,” she said. “You had your chance. You could have actually fought an actual sort-of-Kinslayer alongside us. That would have been a true brave thing they might have sung in every tavern taproom. And where were you?”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I do. You heard the name Kinslayer. You were worried you might be the next kin to get slain. And so you bottled it and ran and left us—us mortals—to deal with it. Think of that word, Deffo. We’re mortals, Ralas possibly excepted. We die. Doesn’t mean we don’t stand up and do things that might get us killed.”

  “It’s not the same,” he whimpered, but his own voice showed just how little he believed it. “Please, give me another chance, Celestaine. I don’t want to be just—”

  “Just another person?” she asked him. “Not a great Guardian, champion of the gods, beloved of the people, but just one of us? Tough. Go back to being a badger.”

  After he’d slunk away from the fire, the five of them pressed on into the dry lands, following the directions Amkulyah had gleaned from the captive Aethani. Little clans of Grennishmen watched them from cracks in the rock; great vulture-like birds rode the arid winds above. In the distance, something like a huge harvestman stalked the horizon on great arching legs that must have been thirty feet long. Nothing approached them, though, for good or ill, and by dusk they were nearing their goal. They found a canyon just as promised, snaking into the earth, its sides leaning towards each other precipitously. Caves riddled the sides, mostly small round holes bored by various of the worm-like creatures the Kinslayer had favoured once, but at the canyon’s end was the lair they had been told of, a tall cave mo
uth that had been carved into an archway, and beyond it the abortive workings of some outpost that the Kinslayer had decreed and then abandoned in the early years of the war, his gains against his enemies mounting faster than even he had anticipated.

  There was a fire there, gleaming out at them in the growing dark, and Kul claimed he could see a single figure sitting at it, as though waiting for them. Nobody suggested going over and asking for hospitality, but they made their own camp within sight of it and waited until morning.

  “YOU SURE YOU don’t just want to go warm yourself by their fire?” Doctor Fisher suggested sourly. Catt had decreed that they camp within easy sight of Celestaine’s party, save of course for their shrouding magic. “If that Yogg mage casts his senses over this way, he’ll sniff us out for sure.”

  “Only if you’ve not done your work properly,” Catt said. They were in the hut again, watching Celestaine’s campfire from one window, while another gave onto the lone fire built by their unknown quarry. Catt was just setting up a complex framework of lenses on a tripod, the better to spy on their opponent. “I was actually going to just go over and get the crown once it’s full dark. I mean, why bother waiting? We could be gone by dawn. Of course, that remains an efficacious stratagem only if it’s available to be abstracted, so let’s see…”

  Fisher looked from him to the currently bare table. “So we’re going to eat soon, or…?”

  “Oh, have it give us a cold spread or something.” Catt bent down and peered through some of the lenses, slotting others in and out. “Big fellow, certainly. And still wearing a Templar’s livery. I thought we’d established he wasn’t a Temple regular?”

  “Not established anything,” Fisher grunted. “Unless he’s got the crown out on a rock for polishing, what’re you going to accomplish, exactly?”

  “This individual has put us all to a great deal of trouble,” Catt remarked, still fiddling with lenses. “I speak not just for the two of us, but for poor Celestaine, who has been forced from fire to frying pan and back in tracking down this collectable for us, and whose indignities I feel fiercely.” At Fisher’s snort he lifted his head. “What, you think that, just because I am similarly taking advantage, I can have no sympathies for the woman?”

  Fisher’s reply was occluded by a huge mouthful of bread, which was possibly just as well.

  “There we are.” Catt was at last satisfied with the orientation of the lenses. “I see a man, I see… a chest. He’s sitting on it, unfortunately, but there is a distinct dweomer arising from it. Or from his backside, but let us hope it is the chest which is enchanted. The alternative is grim and bizarre.”

  “Could be any old magic tat,” Fisher suggested, “or a false enchantment, you know, like they had in Ellas.”

  Catt tutted. “Unless I am misreading these devices like a mere novice thaumaturge, there is something of an appropriate level of magnitude out there, and though I cannot be absolutely certain of its presence within the chest, where else is the thing going to be?”

  “Let me see it.” Fisher waited for him to step aside and then put his own eye to the device, smearing the lenses with butter. “Hrm,” he said, after a while.

  “May I take it you concur?” Catt asked him.

  Fisher straightened up from the lenses. “You don’t want to go gadding about near him at night, Catty.”

  “Fishy, I don’t gad…”

  “Catt, hear me,” Fisher said, seriously enough that even Catt couldn’t just prattle through it. “You’ve looked, but you’ve not seen. You don’t want to go pulling the nose of this one.”

  Doctor Catt paused, mouth still open, another torrent of words poised on his tongue. At last he shut it, eyebrows raised.

  “Just look, Catty,” Fisher insisted. “Not at the chest, at the man. Use Avandrel’s Blue Eye and the Lens of Grand Sight together, like you should’ve been doing.”

  “Don’t presume to tell me my craft,” Catt said, wounded, and then did as he was told.

  After a while he straightened up, looking a good deal more sober. “Oh, I see. One of them.”

  “Not just ‘one of them,’ Catty,” Fisher said. “Him. The one of them you don’t want to meet.”

  Catt grimaced and looked out of the other window, out at Celestaine’s fire. “I suppose we need to let the poor woman break the ice, then, for all my conscience pricks at me.”

  “Just be ready to take to your heels when you’ve got the thing,” Fisher said darkly. “He’s not going to leave much around here standing, when he knows he’s been had.”

  “HE’S NOT LEFT in the night,” Amkulyah reported. “Just sitting there. He must have seen us.”

  “He’s got friends around, then?” Nedlam squinted up at the canyon walls. Plenty of opportunity for hidden reinforcements in the pitted holes and caves. “Horde of Grennish come to bite our knees, maybe.”

  “A dozen Grennish with bows would make this an unhealthy place to be,” Heno observed. “Celest?”

  She looked from him to the others: big Ned, skinny Kul and timeworn Ralas. “He’s not left because he’s expecting us.”

  “Surely,” Ralas agreed. “He’s been leaving the damnedest trail all over this part of the world, trying to get us killed.”

  “And now there he is, waiting to see who’s made it,” Celestaine finished for him. “Someone who has a use for people who can survive all of that. Someone who needs heroes.”

  “Is that right?” Ralas didn’t look convinced. “He must feel a bit flat, then, seeing us. Saving yourself, we’re not traditional hero material: two Yoggs, a lame duck and these old bones.”

  “What are you thinking?” Heno asked her.

  “I think it might be an old friend,” Celestaine said hesitantly. “After all, he left, didn’t he? He was in those last battles, everyone says so, but when I came to camp with news that the Kinslayer was dead, where was he? Gone. Where? Where he was needed. And now he needs help. That’s what I think.”

  “Wait, wait.” Ralas held his hands up, glancing down the canyon at the archway, the burnt-out fire, the hulking figure. “You’re saying you think that’s Wanderer up there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because all this trying to get us killed doesn’t seem like him,” the bard went on.

  “He never did anything the simple way. He did it so you’d learn, and need him less. He didn’t kill Vermarod; he gave me the means to kill it. So now he wants us, with all we’ve learned.”

  “By ‘us’ you mean you,” Ralas went on. “Look, Celest, I remember you and Wanderer. I remember him turning up with the sword and some sage advice. And, right, he was always there. And then I got killed a few times and missed the rest of the war, but I’ll take your word that he was in it right to the end, the only Guardian who properly pitched in and didn’t get killed for their trouble. And, well, you treated him like he was your magic uncle.”

  “My… what?”

  “Magic uncle gives you a sword. Magic uncle always says the right things, always has the best advice. When the war started, Celest, you were a girl trying to avoid leading the Fiddlehead after your folks died. Magic uncle always had much more fun things to do than knuckle down and mind the farm. Who even is minding the farm, anyway?”

  “I have cousins, plenty of cousins. Let them have it. That isn’t even important.” Celestaine could feel herself getting angry with him, mostly because bards could tell you the truth in such a way that it got through any kind of armour. “I’m going now. I’m going to speak to him, to ask him what this is all about. He’ll have a good reason, I know it. He knew we’d sort out Thukrah, and Silvermort, and the Ilkand Temple.”

  “General Thuk had it all sorted out already,” Nedlam muttered, but Celestaine ignored her.

  “Celest,” Ralas snapped. “Whoever this is, he left me to rot in the pits beneath Bleakmairn. You’re going to tell me the Wanderer had a good reason for that?”

  She stared at him, trying to force out the Yes, but not able to quite get it
past her teeth. She had no answers, but she knew she was right, that this was all part of some solid plan of her erstwhile mentor, who hadn’t abandoned her after the war. Who was waiting, just there, to throw off his helm and Templar tabard and…

  “I’m going,” she told them. “To the pits with you, stay here if you want. I’m going.” She turned on her heel and stormed off up the canyon. Soon enough, she heard the rest of them following in her wake.

  I’ll show them. What, precisely, she didn’t know, but she was in a showing mood.

  The figure got to his feet as she approached. He was big, very big, but then plenty of Guardians could change their shape—look at Deffo’s badger fixation. He wore solid, heavy armour plate, the shield sigil black on white, proud on his surcoat—not quite the current insignia of the Templars, but a more elaborate, archaic version. In one hand he held a huge hammer, something that Nedlam would have had to use two hands with.

  “So.” The deep voice echoed from behind the visor of his helm. “I knew someone would come eventually, no matter what trials I left behind me.”

  Her heart leapt. I’m right! “And here I am!” She flung her arms out, in that moment quite alone despite the others at her back. “I passed. I’m here.” She felt a worm of doubt when no welcome was immediately forthcoming. “You… know me?”

  “I do,” the figure said heavily. “I see before me Celestaine of Fernreame, of that band known as the Slayers.”

  “Yes…” This wasn’t going how she’d thought. “Take off the helm, will you? Just… be yourself, like you used to. You’re sounding as though you didn’t… expect me.”

  “I did not,” he confirmed. “And I confess that, of all who might have come for the Kinslayer’s crown, your presence here disappoints me greatly.”

  She stared at him.

  “I knew the lure of its power would draw the greedy and the foolish,” his leaden voice went on. “And I was prepared to meet with any not deterred or destroyed by what I had left behind. I expected something like them.” And a gauntleted hand waved towards the Yorughan behind her. “Not you, not one who had done so much good, now turned to darkness.”