Кейт Новак - Azure Bonds

“I knew none of this when her allies completed a bridge to my place of exile. If I had not been half mad with loneliness and grief for the death of my songs, I might have seen through Cassana’s unholy alliance immediately. But Cassana used her sweetest manner, and Phalse played on my desire for retribution. Zrie cloaked himself in the illusion of a living mage. I was not told of the Fire Knives or Moander or Phalse’s master.

“I gave up all my secrets, and they helped me build Alias. Later, I learned that the money for the project came from the Fire Knives, and that Moander provided the life energy needed to start Alias breathing. Cassana provided the body, Zrie the power to keep death from her, and Phalse’s master the power to bind a soul in her.”

“Dragonbait’s soul,” Akabar breathed.

“The saurial, yes.”

“And you taught her to sing,” Olive said.

“Oh, more than that. I spun her entire history, her thoughts, her feelings, her beliefs. A full personality that could interact with others. She was to be my redemption, my justification, of all I had done. I wanted to be sure that no one could see the beauty of my achievement without forgiving the evil means I used to accomplish it.

“But my allies had their own purposes, something I should have realized when each gave her a different name. I named her Alias because I could not give her my own. All I wanted was for her to live in peace and sing my songs.

“Then they branded her and the saurial, which Phalse’s master had provided as sacrifice to give her a soul, and I understood they intended her to be a slave.

“I argued with Cassana, and for the first time she showed me her true nature. She’d left the empty space in the brand to represent me—another of her cruel jokes. I walked out on her and came down here, for this is where Alias and Dragonbait were being kept. I tried to convince myself to destroy Alias rather than bring her into this world bonded to so much evil.”

The former Harper looked in the cell where Akabar had hung as though he still saw someone there. Tears welled in his eyes. “I am too reasonable a man to believe in miracles, but I suppose they must occur in spite of what I believe. When we’d left her in the cell that evening she was breathing but unconscious. Our calculations said she would not awaken until the saurial was slain. He was very near death already. He had killed many Fire Knives in one attempt to escape, and they beat him every chance they got. They’d left him hanging by the same hook you occupied, mage.

“When I returned here that night, the lizard was lying on the straw, wrapped in Alias’s cloak. She had taken him down and was tending his wounds, singing him a lullaby, like a child with a doll.

“I sneaked upstairs to fetch the sword I had bought for Alias and some healing potions for the saurial. I also sought his sword, which Cassana had given to me because I was the only one who could pick it up without pain. I wasn’t certain I could trust Alias with the swords. She was like a very little child. So I gave her the potions and told her what to do with them. When the saurial regained consciousness, I told him I would free him if he would help Alias escape—that he must take her as far from Westgate as possible. He readily agreed.

“I had to remain behind to cover their escape. An hour before dawn, when we were all preparing to leave for the sacrifice of the saurial, Cassana realized what I had done. She would have destroyed me that moment, but Phalse ordered that I be spared. He thought I might know where they had gone, and he interrogated me in his own fashion. I thought I was safe because I had given the lizard no specific instructions, but I planted in Alias a great nostalgia for Shadowdale. I wanted her to sing there. Phalse learned this, and that is how he knew where to wait for you.”

“That’s where you met him,” Akabar accused Olive.

The halfling shrugged. “You knew Alias wasn’t human, but you never told me.” She turned back to the true bard. “Phalse let you live then?”

“That was Cassana’s decision. She changed her mind about destroying me. She left me in this chamber, where my thoughts would wander and my strength fade so I would grow more pliable. She wanted my help on other projects and … my company.”

“Piggish, isn’t she?” Olive said. “Just think, Akash, you could have been co-concubine with an ex-Harper.”

Akabar fixed the halfling with a cold stare.

“Well,” Olive Ruskettle said with a grin, “she may be a witch, but I can’t knock her taste in men—living ones that is. Shouldn’t we be leaving soon if we’re going to stop this saurial sacrifice?”

“We wait only until moonset,” the true bard explained. “To avoid the patrols of Fire Knives.”

“You’ve been babbling away in that cell for a month now. How do you know when moonset is?” Olive asked.

The crafter picked up a drumstick and took a bite of the meat, chewed, and swallowed before he smiled sweetly at her. “You forget, Mistress Ruskettle, a bard never loses count of the measure.”

When Dragonbait woke, he was tethered face up on a cold, stone slab with his tail flattened uncomfortably beneath him. He flexed his claws, trying to cut at the bindings that pulled his limbs toward the four corners of the stone, but little metallic twanging noises told him the bindings were not hemp or leather, but thin, steel wires. A dull ache warned him that the wire was slicing through his scales whenever he moved.

He opened his eyes and, through the great fangs carved of stone that ringed the hillock, saw that the sky was beginning to redden. Just beside the stone slab, in the center of the fanged maw, was a large fire circle filled with day-old ash. He had seen it from the air yesterday—the mound outside Westgate where the worshipers of Moander had waited to receive Alias from their god. The ancient and worn stone they had tied him to was lined with blood-gutters, leaving him no doubt as to the stone’s purpose.

Concentrating, he summoned his shen . Mist had come as close as she could when she described him to the others as a paladin. From what he had gathered in his short time on this world, he and his brothers had much in common with that breed of fighter, and they had many of the same gods-given powers. But shen was not quite the same as a Realms paladin’s ability to detect evil. With it, Dragonbait could determine all the myriad types of evil that preyed on the soul, the absence of evil, and the grace that nourished the soul. He was also able to judge the strength of a spirit.

The human mage’s spirit had begun as an orb of dull yellow—weak, but without malice or arrogance; a little greed, but not much. The change in him had been astounding. His battle with Moander had strengthened his spirit a hundredfold. His soul grew cleaner, though grace was something he had yet to reach for.

The halfling had changed little—a wavering spirit, colored with avarice and ambition, heightened by pinpricks of petty, but deeper, nastiness. Her music helped keep these things at bay, but recently not even that had halted a growing smear of jealousy.

He would not ordinarily have searched two such as these, but the human swordswoman had decided to travel with them, and he took his oath to protect her very seriously. Her spirit was often so weak it frightened him. He was afraid her spirit would falter, not only because he was duty bound to her, but because her soul was touched with a midsummer sky blue of grace. He wanted to preserve that.

Now, though, he admitted to himself that he had failed. The hill around him ebbed and pulsed with an evil light. Soon, he would be killed, the swordswoman’s spirit would be quenched, and she would be turned to evil.