Crossed Blades by Kelly McCullough Read Free Book Online Page A

this, but I didn’t have a choice.
    Stop,
Triss mindspoke.
Bend over, your sword’s a few inches to the left of your forward foot.
    I reached out a hand and found the blade. I cut my finger in my hurry as I slid it along the wet steel, searching for the hilt in the still blinding downpour. As soon as I had a grip I started moving again. Faster now, as Triss spoke directions into the silence of my mind.
    Left a bit, or you’ll hit a tomb. You’ve a free twenty yards in front of you, go. Watch out, there’s a divot here where the gardeners missed a slink’s burrow, jump. There, just ahead is the line of the cliff where Ashvik’s tomb lies. Let me slide left and right to find the way . . . got it! Jax is gone, but there’s a shadow trail.
    Lead on.
    We caught up with Faran and the unconscious Jax atop a long low tomb built half into the wall of the bluff.
    “Faran,” I called, “I’m coming up, try not to stab me.”
    I dragged myself up beside them, fighting against the teeth of the wind all the way. Jax lay in a heap on her side, her face pillowed on her limp arm—presumably to keep her from drowning in the rapidly puddling water that was overwhelming the drains in the low parapet.
    “She’s alive?” I asked.
    “Barely,” replied Ssithra, invisible in the darkness. “The lightning lance pierced the bottom of her lung. Sshayar is very worried. We need to get her someplace warm and dry.”
    “First, we need to get the fuck out of the palace compound before the stone dogs show up,” I said.
    “That’s why we’re up here,” said Faran. “I thought they might have more trouble spying us out through the elemental muddle of the tomb.”
    “Good thinking,” said Triss.
    It was, too. The stone dogs were creatures of earth with powers of and over their element. The Zhani custom of invoking all the elements to honor their fallen mighty created a multielemental barrier between the earth under the foundations of their tombs and the air above. Fire and water came in the shape of the altar flame and the fountain; air and shadow surrounded the bier where the embalmed bodies lay in their sarcophagi within their tombs. Of the six great elements only light was not included separately, though light’s great ally, fire, made sure it was not totally excluded. A stone dog would have to be right underneath us to sense us through all that, an all too likely circumstance if we didn’t get out of there fast.
    “Sshayar,” I said. “It’s Aral. I have to get Jax out of here unless moving her will kill her.”
    “You do not look as I remember you, but there’s no mistaking Triss.” A barely visible patch of darkness lifted itself up from Jax’s side and I knew from long experience that I now faced a shadow tiger, its stripes formed by subtle difference of shading and texture—Sshayar. “It’s good to see you both alive after so many years when we had feared you dead. Do what you have to do, I will see to Jax’s wounds. They aren’t nearly so bad as I first believed, but I still need to pack them with cool shadows if they are to heal as quickly as possible.”
    Then the shadow collapsed, falling back down to wrap itself tightly around her stricken mistress. I bent and lifted Jax onto my shoulders, glad of how tiny she was. With her wounds, I would have preferred to cradle her like an infant, but that would have left me defenseless. None of us could afford that.
    “Faran, you’re going to have to lead the way back to the wall and over.” I opened my trick bag and started digging for a couple of leather straps to bind Jax in place. “Kill anyone who gets in the way.”
    “Of course,” she said, and a feral smile flashed briefly in the rain. “I’ve already ghosted my first ever priest of the Hand tonight—I think that’s when the storm started. It sure as hell got worse when you killed that second one. Maybe I’ll get lucky and bag a third to give us a triad. Let me just make sure the first stage is