A shift in the wind gave us the first hint of something wrong. We were less than two hundred yards away and fully expecting dozens of assassins in wafty dark blue silk to start swarming all over us. But then the wind shifted and the smell of burning filled my senses.
“I don’t understand,” I said, peering toward the tower. “Are they cooking something?”
Kest shook his head. “No. Whatever that is, it’s not burning anymore. This happened some time ago.”
Only when we were very close to the pointy tower did we see the signs of fire. They’d been hidden by the blackness of the stone, but up close I could see the charred edges of rocks. I suppose that’s why I didn’t immediately notice the old man sitting on a rock waiting for us.
“You’re late,” he said. His face was turned toward the last dying light of the sun. There were blackened holes where his eyes should have been.
I looked around for any sign of the man we’d followed. “Who are you?” I asked the old man.
“No one of consequence,” he replied.
“There are no Dashini,” the old man said. “There never were. The Dashini were just a story your parents told you to make you say your prayers at night.”
“Are you mad? You’re sitting right next to their monastery.”
The old man laughed. “Really? Wouldn’t that be something then? But no, I assure you, there is no monastery, for there are no Dashini.”
“Then who are you?”
“A messenger,” he said.
“What’s your message then?” Kest asked.
“No,” I said, “first tell us for whom you are keeping the message, and for how long?”
The old man laughed. “Ah, see, not as dumb as you look, then.”
“How would you know how dumb we look? You’re blind,” I said.
“True, and yet I can say with absolute confidence that you look like a fool. Isn’t the universe a wondrous place?”
“Just—”
The old man held up a hand. “For you,” he said. “My message is for you.”
“And who am I?” I asked.
“Well, we could play this game all night but it’s getting cold and I’ve been waiting a long time. My message is for you, Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats.”
“How long have you been waiting for me?”
“Well now, I haven’t really been keeping track. Perhaps you could answer that one yourself.”
I thought about that for a moment, then I said, “Perhaps I could, if you can tell me what action of mine required you to give me a message.”
“Ah,” he said, “see? Clever. Such a clever, clever fool you are. Well, let me answer you this way: my message comes from those who once were, but now are not, nor were they ever.”
“We’re not interested in games,” Kest said. There was an angry tension around his eyes. He’d been expecting a fight, release for the angry fire burning just under his skin. “Not anymore. Are you working for the Dashini or not?”
“The Dashini?” the old man said, barely holding back laughter. “Didn’t I tell you? There never were any Dashini.”
“Of course there were,” Kest said, his voice almost a growl. “Falcio killed two of them in Rijou.”
“Ah, you see? That’s the proof right there.”
“Proof of what?” I asked.
“Every one knows the Dashini never fail, not in the two thousand years of their supposed existence. It would be impossible for the Dashini to fail, for to do so—”
Finally the pieces fell into place for me. “For to fail would mean they were not Dashini, and therefore never were.”
The old man picked up his crutch and pushed himself to a standing position. “Now you understand, and now I can deliver my message.”
He got up hobbled around the base of the tower and as we followed the smell hit us. There was a great pit dug there. At first the charcoal smoke made it hard to see, but gradually the hazy shadows resolved into the charred remains of corpses. There must have been more than a hundred of them.
“Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears,” I said, my hand to my lips—although anyone who thinks this is an effective method for keeping the taste and stench of a hundred dread bodies out of their nose and mouth is deluding themselves. “How could this happen?”
“Falcio, look.” Kest pointed to a body on the top of the pile: a lot of the skin was blackened, but he was still recognizable. It was the assassin from Rijou, the man we’d been pursuing across Tristia.
“He killed himself,” I said, and I could hear the disbelief in my own voice. “He led us all the way here and then he just killed himself.” I turned to the old man. “Why?”
“Because he was not allowed to tell you, so he brought you here to see.”
“But how could they have all—?”
“They, Trattari? What they do you speak of?” the old man asked. “There’s nothing there. It’s a shame though, isn’t it? About the Dashini not having existed? Does it mean, do you suppose, that the Bardatti never existed, either? That the Trattari are simply something we imagined as well? Would that not be the darkest truth? The truth that makes our courage fail and our hearts surrender?”
“The Dashini have nothing to do with us, or the Bardatti,” I said, wondering as the words came out of my mouth if I was telling the truth.
“Really? Trattari—Bardatti—Dashini . . . Do you truly not see?”
The implications started to grow in my mind. Was there was a connection between the Troubadours, the Greatcoats, and the Dashini? And if that was the case, what did it mean—?
The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and red. He popped it into his mouth and began sucking on it. “Oh my,” he said. “I’ve wanted one of these for so long. I can’t begin to tell you how good it tastes.”
I took hold of the old man’s arm. “Who are you?”
“Who are you talking to?” the old man asked. He shrugged off my hand and walked to the edge of the pit, then he turned so that he was facing us.
“You said you were a messenger—so tell me who you are.”
“A messenger? Why, a man would need to have someone to give him a message in order to be a messenger, wouldn’t he? And since there’s no one to have given the message, there can be no messenger, can there?”
“Look, old man, we—”
“Old man? There’s no old man here—there is no one at all, just two fools who climbed a mountain to speak to no one; to find nobody; to learn nothing.” He pulled a short black dagger, thin as a needle, from inside his shirt and held it between both his hands. “You know, I feel sorry for you, Falcio val Mond. I really do.” Then in one sure motion he stabbed it into his own heart.
“No!” I cried, but even as I reached for him the old man toppled backward into the pit, on top of the charred remains of those who had once called themselves the Dashini. The blood seeping out from his chest was lost in the blackness surrounding him.
I looked into the pit, my eyes searching for something—anything—that would give this meaning. I’d risked everything to come here, only to find the Dashini dead, and apparently long before the murders had begun. But if the Dashini weren’t responsible, then who was behind the madness overtaking Tristia?
“We have to go,” Kest said.
The strain in his voice was worrying. I turned to see what was wrong.
Kest’s skin was as red as fresh blood.
We traveled faster than was safe, sliding on shale and slipping down the muddy paths. Kest was quiet most of the way, though sometimes I could hear him mumbling to himself; I stopped asking him what was wrong as really, it was pretty damn obvious, and I decided I could do without the glaring back at me. Sometimes he refused even to glare back and that was worse.
We lost our way several times, even with the red glow of Kest’s skin breaking the shadows in front of us, but in the end, we found our way back, because eventually all things fall to earth. When we reached the bottom of the trail, he stopped suddenly and stood there.
“What is it?” I said, looking around to see what had unnerved him. There was no sign of enemies. The clearing was small, mostly grass, dotted here and there with a few stones and some broken shale. It was surrounded by trees, and there were a few reddish rocks around the very edge. When Kest still didn’t speak I said, “Please, tell me what’s wrong—I’ve got enough problems to deal with without you being—”
Kest walked away from me for several paces, then he turned to face me. “Draw,” he said.
I realized he was standing ten paces away from me: the exact distance we used when beginning a duel. Worse, he was not just glowing red from head to toe but positively pulsating. “What in all the hells is this about?” I asked, although I was beginning to have a horrible feeling I already knew.
“Draw your sword,” he said.
“I won’t fight you, Kest. Just stop and think this through.”
“No, enough thinking, enough talk—enough dragging me around chasing answers that don’t exist.” His voice was hard as steel, as if every last trace of humanity had drained out of him. “I’ve followed you on every one of your damn fool’s errands and that’s enough. I came to the top of that mountain for the promise of worthy opponents—and instead we found nothing.”
“The promise of—? Kest, have you lost your mind? Did you think this was all just so you could have an entertaining fight?”
“Draw,” he said. “Draw, or else I’ll cut you down where you stand.”
“I won’t fight you, Kest.”
“Yes,” he said, “you will.” He leaped forward, drawing his blade from its sheath in one smooth motion and swinging it in a vertical arc toward my head.
Of course I reacted entirely on reflex. I drew my own rapiers and batted Kest’s blade out of the way. “Stop!” I cried, but he ignored me and attacked again, forcing me to back away even as I parried. Kest fights with a warsword, which is a great deal heavier and carries far more force than my rapiers. It’s also supposed to be a lot slower, but in Kest’s hands the blade was moving so quickly I could barely see it in time to parry.
“Come on, Falcio,” he said. “You beat me before so let’s see you do it again!”
But that had been years ago, and then I’d won through a trick—one I had no chance of repeating, not now when I could barely stay on my feet. But apparently Kest didn’t care about any of that.
His blade whirred by me again and this time I felt something nick my cheek. “Attack me!” he said.
“Please, Kest, stop! Don’t make me—”
A woman’s voice broke the night air. “What in all the hells are you doing?” Dariana asked.
“Get away!” I shouted. “Get out of here!”
“Yes,” Kest said, tossing his sword from hand to hand as if it were weightless, “go away and practice. Practice lots. Come back in a few years when you might be able to give me an interesting fight.”
Dariana looked uncertain, but she didn’t look scared, which surprised me. Anyone facing Kest with a blade in his hand should be as terrified as I was.
He can’t stop himself, I realized belatedly, because he’s lost in the red rage. This was exactly what Birgid had warned me of. And of course she was right: becoming the Saint of Swords wasn’t a blessing from the Gods at all. It was a curse—even Trin had said so—and now Kest was suffering from a bloodlust that demanded he find foes good enough to genuinely challenge him.
“What should I do?” Dariana asked. She began to draw her sword, and it struck me yet again that she wasn’t frightened.
Why the hells was she not frightened?
“Don’t,” I said. “He’ll kill you.”
“Not until I’ve killed you first, Falcio. Come on, you can beat me. You’ve always been able to beat me—and yet you prance about pretending I’m better than you, when all the while you’re laughing at me behind my back.”
He needs to believe that I can beat him so he can fight me. He needs to believe I genuinely have a chance . . . I sighed inwardly. Hells, this had better work. I pulled my coat off and threw it to the ground. “If you cut me, Kest, you’ll kill me.”
He smiled and removed his own coat. “Is that your grand strategy? Is that yet another example of Falcio val Mond’s ‘masterful tactics’?” Without waiting for a reply he launched himself at me again, swinging his sword in a figure-eight pattern that looked predictable and regular and should have been easy to parry, but every time I tried to beat away his sword I somehow missed by a hair.
He’s varying the speed, I realized. Just slightly, just enough that I can’t predict where his blade will end up. “Kest, you’re better than me—you know that. This isn’t a fair fight!”
“It’s fair enough,” he said, and he beat my blade out of line again, forcing me to stumble back.
“The hells for this,” Dariana, drawing a throwing knife from her coat. “He’s lost his mind. I’m taking him out.”
“No,” I said, but it was too late; Dariana had thrown the knife at Kest’s throat. He barely even varied the pattern of his sword-swinging to knock the knife out of the air.
“Maybe you’d like to fight me both at once,” he said.
I tried taking advantage of his attention on Dariana to land a thrust on his leg, and once again he knocked my blade out of the way effortlessly.
“Come on, Dariana,” he taunted her even as he pushed me back, “try another knife—who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky this time.”
She wouldn’t, though. Kest is the best swordsman I’ve ever seen, and he has been since he was thirteen years old. Now he was inhuman and he could knock knives thrown at him all night long if he wanted and still slice me into pieces in the process. There was no way for either of us to get past his guard. Mine, on the other hand . . .
That’s it.
“Another knife,” I shouted to Dariana. “Get out another throwing knife!”
Kest smiled at me and took a step closer, sneaking the tip of his blade past my guard and giving me another small cut on my other cheek. It was probably precisely the same length as the first one.
Dariana drew and took aim at Kest. “No!” I said, running backward several steps and cursing myself in advance for what was to come. “At me! You’ve got to throw it at me.”
“What? Are you mad?”
“Just do it,” I said, “now!”
Kest looked confused for a moment, then he realized what I was planning, but not even he was fast enough to bridge the distance in time. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dariana pull back and throw, at which point it occurred to me that I probably should have been a little bit more specific about where exactly she should aim for.
The blade came through the air and landed in my left shoulder and I screamed long and loud from the pain. It turns out that knowing what’s coming isn’t any kind of a pain reliever.
Kest’s eyes went wide. “Fool! You damned fool! You haven’t got a chance now!” His voice was desperate, almost pleading.
I fell to my knees. Damn, but a knife in the shoulder hurts. I hoped it hadn’t damaged the muscle—if I somehow managed to live through the next few minutes I would probably need it again soon. “Sorry,” I said, pulling the knife out of my shoulder and wincing from the pain, “but I’m not in any shape to give you a fair fight.” I dropped the knife to the ground, just in case. “Maybe if you wait a few weeks, then when I’m all healed up I can give you the spanking you sorely deserve.”
Kest roared incoherently into the night sky. The red glow around him looked like it was burning him up now, eating away at his soul. He threw his warsword through the air and it flew past me within an inch of my face, stopping only when it impaled the trunk of a tree behind me. I watched as he fell to his knees a few feet away from me and began to pound his fists into the ground, over and over and over, until they came up red, but not from the glow, from the blood on his fingers.
“Stop,” I said, and forced myself to my feet. “It’s enough.”
At first I didn’t think he could hear me, but just as I reached him he stopped and his head dropped as if all the strength had left his body. He wasn’t screaming or shouting now; he was crying. “What’s happened to me?” he moaned. “How do I make this stop?” He began to shiver.
“I don’t know,” I replied, and knelt down and put my arms around him.
We stayed like that for a while. I could hear Dariana moving around behind us, likely retrieving her knives.
Eventually Kest pushed me away. “I have to go,” he said.
“What—? Where?”
“The Saint—Birgid—she told me to come with her, but I refused. I told her I needed to stay with you, to protect you.” He laughed hollowly.
“How will you even find her?”
“I . . . She told me about this place, a kind of temple. It’s called Deos Savath. It’s in Aramor—it’s where we’re supposed to go to complete the ritual and gain control over ourselves. I refused, though. I told her I could resist. Gods, Fal, I’m such a fool.”
Part of me wanted to smile. Kest had always quietly insisted that the limitations of normal human beings did not apply to him. But the other part of me realized I was about to lose my best friend. “How long will you need to go?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this. I thought . . . I thought defeating Caveil was a victory. I thought it would make me better, but it hasn’t, Falcio. I’m no better a swordsman than I was before. When I first felt the . . . well, whatever it is that passed from Caveil to me, when I beat him, it was like . . . I don’t know. It was like being somehow completely drunk and yet completely clear-headed. But something inside me broke then. Before, I fought because I wanted to, or because it was needed. Now I . . . I have to . . .”
“I know,” I said quietly. I had spent several years of my own life driven by a madness that had nothing to do with courage or necessity. Ethalia had helped heal me of it, but I didn’t think she could do the same for Kest. I thought about what the Tailor had done, and what I had to do next, and how much I needed Kest beside me to do it, which made it all the more difficult to say, “You have to go. You have to go to that temple and find Birgid.”
Kest looked up at me. “But I don’t know if it will work, Falcio—I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back. If I can’t get control over this . . . whatever ‘this’ is, then—”
“You’ll come back,” I said firmly, and I walked over to pick up our coats, trying to ignore the dagger wound in my shoulder that was sending spikes of fire through my body with each step. “You’ll figure this out and then you’ll come and find me and we’ll save this shitty world from itself.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
I tossed him his coat. “We’re Greatcoats,” I said. “It’s the only thing we’re good at.”
He laughed for a moment.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, rising to his feet. “I just thought, if Brasti was here he’d say something funny, but I couldn’t think what that would be, and then I thought, this is when Brasti would make fun of me for not knowing, and then I started laughing. Odd, isn’t it?” He put on his coat before walking over to the tree and retrieving his sword, and then he walked away into the forest, alone.
“You’re doing quite a bit of bleeding there,” Dariana said.
I looked down at my shoulder and saw the blood seeping through my shirt. “Not as much as it could have been. You managed to get me without tearing the muscle. Nice shot.”
“Couldn’t have you dying on me, could I?”
I reached into my coat and pulled a roll of thin gauze from one of the inner pockets and began wrapping it around my shoulder.
“Here,” she said, “you’re doing it wrong.” She took the gauze from me and put it aside.
“What are you doing?”
She pulled a small bottle of salve from her own coat. “Not much point in wrapping the wound just so you can bleed to death a bit more slowly.”
She was right: I’d forgotten to put salve on the wound. I watched as she carefully rubbed a thin layer of the black salve on the hole in my flesh, and then wrapped the bandage deftly around my shoulder. She moved slowly, carefully.
The waiting was driving me mad. “Can’t you do this any faster?”
“I don’t want to go through all this just to have you keel over and die before we even get started,” she replied.
“Start what?” I asked.
She finished tying the gauze and helped me put my coat back on. “There, see? All better.”
I looked into her eyes and she smiled. “So you’re not dead, and you don’t seem to be accompanied by twelve secret Greatcoats, so what did you learn up there?”
“The darkest truth,” I said, repeating the old man’s words.
“What does that mean?”
“There was an old man there and he said something about what we feared most being ourselves.”
If the Dashini had all committed suicide after I killed two of them in Rijou, then the assassins tearing Tristia apart aren’t Dashini. So who else could they be? And I thought about it, and the answer became clear. It was obvious, really—in fact, people had been trading rumors and gossip about just such a thing for years. My stomach sank, and the sound of my heart became dull and flat in my chest. Who else other the Dashini could sneak into castles, past guards and Knights, to defeat those protecting the Dukes—hells, not just the Dukes but to kill them all, and then get out without being caught? Only one other group of people that I knew of had the skills and training to complete such missions.
“What is it?” Dariana asked.
The truth that makes our courage fail and our hearts surrender. What we fear most is simply ourselves. “The assassins are Greatcoats,” I said sadly. “Our own people are doing this.”
“What? Are you—? Are you sure?”
I ignored the question. Had I ever been this alone in my life? I’d spent the last weeks fearing being paralyzed, isolated inside my own body—and yet here I was, even without the paralysis, trapped and alone.
I looked at Dariana and felt the sadness threaten to reveal what I knew. “Thanks for the salve,” I said. I walked over to my rapiers and picked them up, but I didn’t sheathe them.
“Expecting more trouble?” she asked.
I tried lifting both my rapiers into guard but the pain in my left shoulder nearly made me pass out so I had to let that rapier fall back to the ground. “You weren’t scared,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Of Kest. He said he’d take you next and yet you weren’t afraid—in fact, you didn’t look all that surprised at what happened.”
“Are you out of your mind? Of course I was scared! But what good would running around crying do? I saved your life, remember?”
She looked confused and even angry; there was not a sign on her face of deceit. But I’d been at this a while. “You’re lying,” I said. “You knew he was going to do this.” I looked around at the red rocks that surrounded the clearing. I hadn’t given them any thought before. “Those rocks—they weren’t here when we came by the first time. You put them there to make the Saint’s Fever worse, didn’t you?”
Her expression didn’t change at all, but she held her forefinger just an inch or so away from her thumb. “Just a teensy bit,” she said. “He’d been heading for it for some time. We just couldn’t be sure he would boil over when we needed him to.”
I thought about shouting for Kest, but I knew he was too far away by now. I might have tried it anyway, but there was something else that was bothering me. She hadn’t been scared. “So how many did you bring with you?” I asked, scanning the trees around the clearing. “They’re very good at hiding.”
Dariana nodded, as if we’d just come to an agreement of some kind. “There are nine of us,” she said. “And Kest is far enough away now.”
Figures emerged from the trees, moving silently into the clearing one by one and encircling me. Their swords were drawn. They wore greatcoats.
“It’s better this way,” Dariana said. “If there were fewer of us you might try to fight, and that wouldn’t serve you or the Tailor.”
“You think I’m going to just let you kill me?” I asked.
“Kill you? No, First Cantor, that wouldn’t solve anyone’s problems. You want to confront the Tailor? Yell at her? Threaten her? Fine; we’ll take you to her.”
I looked at the figures around me. “You know she’s going to destroy the entire country, don’t you? Assassinating the Dukes? Arming the peasants and pushing them to rebellion? It’ll be civil war and chaos for a decade.”
Dariana looked at me as if she was trying to decide if I were joking. “See, that’s what I don’t understand about you, Falcio.”
“What’s that?”
“You actually care about these things.”