Кейт Новак - Azure Bonds

Don’t be a fool, she told herself. For someone who’s just fought two dozen assassins, a witch, and a lich, and who’s broken a staff of power, you’re in pretty good shape. You got off easier than Syluné did in Shadowdale. A pang of grief went through her, though, as she remembered how the river witch had met her end.

Is there a difference, she wondered, between the sadness that real people feel and the sadness I was made to feel? What reason would any of my makers have to make me grieve for someone like Syluné? None, she decided. I can think for myself, and I can feel for myself. The “masters” don’t have anything to do with it.

Remembering the recent deaths of all but one of the masters, she looked down to examine her sword arm. The limb still ached from the disappearance of the top three sigils—Cassana’s, Zrie Prakis’s, and the Fire Knives’. All remaining members of the assassins must have been wiped out by the explosion of Zrie’s staff of power. The arm that the sigils occupied had been overgrown with the waving serpent pattern, but only the concentric rings of Phalse’s master remained. And the blank space that’s left, Alias thought, remembering with a shudder Olive’s prediction that something might now grow there.

Alias tried to stand and stumbled to one knee. She was tired and battered. She leaned on Dragonbait’s sword, stood up, and looked around. They were atop a very tall tower that thrust into the shining white sky. The crenelations of the wall about them were curved and pointed like the stones about the Hill of Fangs had been.

She looked down from the tower. It rose from a plain of shining, gray stone that spread out in all directions as far as the eye could see. In a circle about the tower’s foundation, the stone was solid and unmoving, but just beyond, the ground was cracked and shifting like a mud or lava flow.

“You know, Olive, I don’t think we’re in the Realms anymore.”

She limped over to Akabar and Dragonbait. The stranger’s faded garb was a shredded mass of tatters, and his arms and legs were lacerated by a hundred bites the size of large coins. Larger gashes lay across his forehead, chest, and torso, and blood ran freely from his wounds. Olive came up beside Alias and whistled in a low tone.

Dragonbait had the man’s head cradled in his claws, and small, bright arcs of yellow bridged the space between his hands and the man’s face, visible even in the bright light of the white sky. The smell of woodsmoke filled the air. Before their eyes, the flow of blood ceased, and the wounds on the man’s face began to heal. The stranger’s grimace faded and his expression grew peaceful, the deeper wrinkles smoothed from his weather-worn face.

Akabar moved swiftly and surely, tending to the damage that remained when Dragonbait’s healing powers were exhausted. The mage smeared a viscous, green paste over the wounds not yet closed and bound them with strips of his borrowed robe.

Alias knelt beside the mage and the saurial. “Who is he?” she asked.

Dragonbait turned a curious stare on her, and Akabar said, “You don’t recognize him? Are you sure?”

Alias studied the face. He was familiar. Beneath the gray hair and the wrinkled flesh was a man who must once have been very handsome, with a well-formed figure. “Nameless!” Alias whispered.

She turned to explain to the others. “He was in my dream in Shadow Gap, only much, much younger. Unless this is his grandfather or someone.”

“You don’t remember him from anywhere else?” Akabar prompted.

Alias screwed up her face trying to think, but she couldn’t recall him. He wasn’t in her pseudo-memory and there was no other time that she could have known him.

“Of course she can’t remember him,” Olive said with a sniff. “She was just a baby then.”

“What are you talking about?” Alias asked.

“You were just born—so to speak. He set you loose with Dragonbait to look after you. You might say he’s your father.” Olive reached down to touch her on her right wrist where the tattoo wound about the empty space. “He’s the Nameless Bard. Ring a bell?”

“The Nameless Bard,” Alias echoed as she leaned back and thought deeply. She knew that story, but hadn’t associated it with Nameless from her dream. She rocked back and forth as she recalled the tale in full and began to really understand for the first time what she was meant to be and what she had actually turned out to be.

Nameless opened his eyes, and, though his sight was mostly shielded from the bright sky by the four adventurers surrounding him, he raised his hands to shield his eyes. He scowled deeply and muttered, “Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig.”

Akabar and Olive exchanged glances. The halfling shrugged. Alias moved closer to the old man.

When Nameless caught sight of the swordswoman, he tried to sit up, but his remaining wounds caused him too much pain to do so. Dragonbait moved to support his back, but Nameless waved him away. With some effort, he pulled himself to a seated position, facing Alias.

He gazed at her bloodied, disheveled form and sighed. “You are everything I intended—and more.”

“You’re the Nameless Bard,” Alias replied, her tone even and emotionless.

“Yes. Do you remember my tale? I did not put it in you, as I did the other tales, but told it to you the hour you first woke, while we waited for the potions to heal Dragonbait so you could run away with him.”

Alias shook her head. “I don’t remember hearing it. I only remember it.”

“What do you remember?” Nameless prompted her.

“It’s the tale of a man with overweening vanity who betrayed his scruples trying to complete a task he knew very well had the potential for tremendous abuse.”

Olive gasped and Akabar bit on his lower lip.

The color drained from Nameless’s face.

“Am I wrong?” Alias asked.

A long moment passed. The cloudless sky flashed and crashed as a lightning storm erupted overhead. The energy discharges cast sharp shadows of the party on the tower roof’s gray flagstones.

“How can you say that?” Nameless whispered.

“Sounds to me like she put her own interpretation on the story,” Olive said smugly. “What do want to bet she tinkers with your songs, too?”

In a defeated tone, the true bard said, “I’ve failed.”

Akabar grinned. “True. You tried to make a thing, and instead you created a daughter. In Turmish, we’d say you were blessed by the gods.”

Alias smiled at the mage gratefully.

“Might even outdo her old man as a bard,” Olive predicted.

Nameless looked up in surprise at the halfling. Obviously it had never occurred to him that his creation might improve on his work. He was too proud and too vain. “I gave you everything I could,” he said.

“A false history, your songs, and no true name,” Alias said.

“I gave you a past so you would not feel alone and removed from those you would live among, and my songs were all I had left. I set you free at the price of my own freedom. When Cassana dragged me from my cell to distract you in a dream, I tried to warn you. She controlled most of my words and actions, but I did tell you how to defeat her kalmari.”

“Yes. You did those things,” Alias admitted flatly.

The true bard looked anguished. “But you still hate me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Alias replied. A grin broke through her grim expression. “Don’t human children often disagree with their parents without hating them?”

“Do you think of me as your father then?”

The swordswoman shrugged. “I don’t know. You hardly gave me anything in the way of a family in my memories. I’m not very practiced at feeling filial affection. Do you think of me as a daughter?”