Free Darkened Blade: A Fallen Blade Novel by Kelly McCullough

cut his throat there by the little stream where we had camped. To simply be done with the problem that he presented. Easier in many ways than abandoning him, and
much
easier than doing what I intended. For that matter, I would have enjoyed it, but that wouldn’t have served the mission.
    I glanced at the Storm. “Do you understand Varyan?” I asked in the language of my birth. Then switched to the one I’d spoken most over the last decade. “Or Zhani?” I was moderately fluent in a half dozen more, including the formal church dialect of Heaven’s Reach, but I was best with those two.
    The Storm, which took the shape of a hoop of braided silver centered by a catlike green eye the size of my head, flicked gray wings and rose into the air. It hovered there for a long beat before bobbing twice in an unmistakable nod.
    “Both?”
    Again, the Storm bobbed in place.
    “But you don’t speak?”
    It twisted back and forth in the air, and small lightnings danced in its wings.
    “I’ll take that as a no.”
    The Storm bobbed again.
    Up to this point, Kelos and Siri had been the ones having the most to do with our addled priest. I hadn’t the magic for it, and Faran had neither the patience nor the mercy. She hated the Hand much more viscerally than any of the rest of us, for they had stolen more than friends and home from her—they had taken her childhood.
    If we’d left him to her care he probably would have
died of his wounds, unexpectedly in the night . . . see
. After which, Faran would have pointed to the brand new slice in his throat and smiled sweetly. Which, admittedly, would have made my life simpler.
    I sighed and looked at the Storm. “Do you know why he’s not recovering better?”
    The Storm twisted in the air, its wings darkening noticeably.
    “Neither do we, which means we need to take him to a real expert. The university at Tavan has one of the best healers’ halls in the eleven kingdoms, and we’ll arrive in that city tonight.”
    The storm rocked in the air but the agitation of its wings faded.
    I don’t think it understood all that,
sent Triss.
It’s not much brighter than Scheroc . . . or a big dog for that matter. Air elementals just don’t seem to have any real intellectual depth to them.
    It really doesn’t matter as long as it calms down and lets us hide them both in a rug so that we can carry them up to the university without drawing too much attention.
    Like all the cities of the Magelands, Tavan was centered around a great magical university whose governing council also ruled the city. The council was an elected body made up of senior members of the faculty, all of whom were mages. Likewise, most of the larger towns had magic colleges or individual mage orders making the important decisions. It was a land of refugees formed in the aftermath of the wars that had turned the West that was into an uninhabitable wasteland, and any mage from anywhere in the eleven kingdoms could ask for Magelands citizenship and expect to receive it.
    That had the unintended but fortunate effect of rendering the country all but immune to the risen takeover the Son of Heaven had arranged throughout much of the rest of the eleven kingdoms. It did not, however, free the city from the usual pestilence of temples. There were many gods, and the Son was titular head of their various earthly hierarchies in his role as chief priest of the highest church of the East.
    Most of the Son’s predecessors hadn’t managed to exert much control beyond the priesthood of Shan, current Emperor of Heaven, whose archpriest he was. But, there, too, the curse of the risen had allowed the current Son to change the balance of power by the simple expedient of convertingthe majority of his fellow hierarchs into his undead servants. Now, the combined churches danced to his whim, and that made carrying an obviously injured Hand through the streets of any city in the East a dangerous prospect.
    *   *   *
    I
wonder where Siri