Broken Blade by Kelly McCullough Page A

toward the city proper.
    I picked up a bottle of Kyle’s as I passed through the Gryphon on my way back to my room over the stables. It had been an excruciatingly long and nasty night, and I really needed the drink. I set the bottle carefully beside a borrowed glass on my little table before I started to strip off my gear.
    Triss flowed up the wall and into dragon form. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
    I yanked off my hood and dropped it on the pallet. “I do. In case you weren’t paying attention back there, my old friend Devin’s become some kind of fucking assassin for hire along with who knows how many of the others. Not to mention that he wants us to join him in his abomination. If that’s not the best reason for getting drunk this side of Namara’s murder, I don’t know what is.”
    Triss let out a loud, hissing sound and reared back, but didn’t say anything. The purpose of a Blade of Namara was to bring a just death to those who deserved it. Killing was part of our job, and both Triss and I had once been damned good at it; but even the idea of doing it for money seemed the most horrible sort of perversion of what we had once been. I shrugged out of my poncho, throwing it down beside my hood. As I unbuckled my swords, I nodded toward the trunk.
    “Open that for me, would you?”
    Triss slid down from the wall and briefly covered the trunk in shadow. With a sharp clicking noise, the lid popped open. I flipped the poncho from bed to trunk with the toe of my boot. It landed in a lump guaranteed to leave creases. The hood followed, then my shirt.
    “You normally put your swords on the bottom.” Triss’s voice came out quiet and worried.
    “Fuck normal.” I grabbed my sword rig off the bed and rebuckled it over my bare shoulders. “In fact, fuck everything.”
    “What are you doing?” Triss sounded more than a little alarmed as I crossed to the door.
    I didn’t answer, just grabbed the handle and wrenched the door open. Triss dove back into my shadow as the magelight threw it across the floor of the hayloft. As I strode over to the hay pile, my shadow slid across the trapdoor that led down to the stables. When it did, one dark arm stopped mirroring my own movement long enough to flip the door shut—a sensible precaution on Triss’s part though I barely registered it.
    I pulled a half dozen of the rough bundles of hay free of the pile, and started leaning them against various of the roof posts. Two fell apart at once when the dried loops of braided grass that held them together for transport to the city gave way under my rude handling. The others held, more or less. I added more, putting a couple along the walls and two against the hay pile itself.
    Stepping out into the middle of the big open room, I rolled my shoulders and fixed the positions of the bundles in my mind. A deep breath in, and . . . I let the rage free with my breath. Seemingly of their own accord, my swords dropped into my hands and flicked out, the left taking off the top of a hay bundle in a beheading stroke, the right going home in a heart thrust that sank the tip deep into the post behind it. Pivot and wrench my right blade free while back-cutting with my left to split the beheaded bundle. Stomp and cross swords in a blade-breaking parry. Turn, lunge.
    I sliced and chopped and parried and thrust until every bundle was destroyed. Until the sweat rolled down my sides, and the air grew thick with chaff. Until I could barely breathe for coughing. Until my eyes streamed tears from the dust, and I could no longer see Devin’s face even in my imagination. It wasn’t enough.
    With a snap of my wrist, I sent one sword flying down the length of the loft to embed itself in the door of my cubby. Then the other. An utterly useless little trick and suicide in combat, but it felt good, and it freed my hands to collect more bundles. When I was done, there were no more bundles, just a big loose pile of hay and a thick cloud of dust,