by Brent Weeks
“Thank you, but I’m an awkward hand at new horses. I’ll take my own,” Borsini said, his voice carefully neutral. His enormous ears wiggled, and he tugged at his enormous nose nervously. He suspected a trap and knew he’d avoided it, but he wanted Neph to think it was luck.
Neph blinked as if disappointed and then shrugged as if to cover and say it didn’t matter.
It didn’t. He’d tied that cantrip into the mane of every horse in the camp.
5
Kylar had never started a war.
Approaching the Lae’knaught camp required none of the stealth he’d used to approach the Ceurans. Invisible, he simply walked past the sentries in their black tabards emblazoned with a golden sun: the pure light of reason beating back the darkness of superstition. Kylar grinned. The Lae’knaught were going to love the Night Angel.
The camp was huge. It held an entire legion, five thousand soldiers, including a thousand of the famed Lae’knaught Lancers. As a purely ideological society, the Lae’knaught claimed they held no land. In practice, they’d occupied eastern Cenaria for eighteen years. Kylar suspected this legion had been sent here as a show of force to deter Khalidor from trying to push further east. Maybe they just happened to be here.
In truth, he didn’t care. The Lae’knaught were bullies. If there had been a shred of integrity in their claim of fighting black magic, they would have come to Cenaria’s defense when Khalidor invaded. Instead, they’d bided their time, burning local “wytches” and recruiting among the Cenarian refugees. They’d probably been hoping to come to the rescue after Cenaria’s power was obliterated and take even better lands for their pains.
Without provoking anyone, Cenaria had been invaded from the east by the Lae’knaught, from the north by Khalidor, and now from the south by Ceura. It was about time some of those hungry swords met each other.
A smoking black blade slid from Kylar’s left hand. He made it glow, wreathed in blue flames, but kept himself invisible. Two soldiers chatting instead of walking their patrol routes froze at the sight. The first one was a relative innocent. In the other’s eyes, Kylar could see that the man had accused a miller of witchcraft because he wanted the man’s wife.
“Murderer,” Kylar said. He slashed with the ka’kari-sword. The blade didn’t so much cut as devour. There was barely any resistance as the blade passed through noseguard, nose, chin, tabard, gambeson, and stomach. The man looked down, then touched his split face, where blood gushed. He screamed and his entrails spurted out.
The other sentry bolted, shrieking.
Kylar ran, pulling his illusions around him. As if through smoke, there were glimpses of gleaming iridescent black metal skin, the crescents of exaggerated muscles, a face like Judgment, with brows pronounced and frowning, high angular cheekbones, a tiny mouth, and glossy black eyes without pupils that leaked blue flames. He ran past a knot of gaunt Cenarian recruits, wide-eyed at the sight of him, weapons in hand but forgotten. There were no crimes in their eyes. These men had joined because they had no other way to feed themselves.
The next group had participated in a hundred burnings, and worse. “Raper!” Kylar yelled. He slid the ka’kari-sword through the man’s loins. It would be a bad death. Three more died before anyone attacked him. He danced past a spear and lopped off its head, then kept running for the command tents at the center of the camp.
A trumpet shrilled an alarm, finally. Kylar continued down the lines of tents, sometimes slipping back into invisibility, always reappearing before he killed. He cut loose some of the horses to create confusion, but not many. He wanted this army to be able to react quickly.
In minutes, the entire camp was in pandemonium. A team of horses dragging their hitching post bolted, the post whipping back and forth, tangling in tents and dragging them away. Men screamed, shouting obscenities, gibbering about a ghost, a demon, a phantasm. Some attacked each other in the darkness and confusion. A tent went up in flames. Whenever an officer emerged, shouting, trying to bring order, Kylar killed. Finally, he found what he was looking for.
An older man burst out of the largest tent in the camp. He threw a great helm on his head, the symbol of a Lae’knaught underlord, a general. “Form up! Hedgehog!” he shouted. “You fools, you’re being beguiled! Hedgehog formation, damn you!”
Between their terror and his voice being muted by the great helm, few men listened at first, but a trumpeter blew the signal again and again. Kylar saw men starting to form loose circles of ten with their backs to each other, spears out.
“You’re only fighting yourselves. It’s a delusion. Remember your armor!” The underlord meant the armor of unbelief. The Lae’knaught thought superstitions only had power if you believed in them.
Kylar leapt high into the air, and let himself become visible as he dropped in front of the underlord. He landed on one knee, his left hand to the ground, holding the sword, his head bowed. Though the cacophony continued in the distance, the men nearby were stunned to silence. “Underlord,” the Night Angel said. “For you I bear a message.” He stood.
“It is nothing but an apparition,” the underlord announced. “Gather! Eagle three!” The trumpeter blew the orders and soldiers began jogging to take up positions.
Over a hundred men crowded the clearing in front of the underlord’s tent, forming a huge circle around him, spears pointing in. The Night Angel roared, blue flames leaping from his mouth and eyes. Flames trickled back down the sword. He whipped the sword in circles so fast it blurred into long ribbons of light. Then he slapped it back into its sheath with a pulse of light, leaving the soldiers blinking away after-images.
“You Lae’knaught fools,” the Night Angel said. “This land is Khalidoran now. Flee or be slaughtered. Flee or face judgment.” By claiming to be Khalidoran, Kylar hoped to draw any backlash onto the Ceurans-disguised-as-Khalidorans who were trying to kill Logan and all his men.
The underlord blinked. Then he shouted, “Delusions have no power over us! Remember your armor, men!”
Kylar let the flames dim, as if the Night Angel were unable to sustain itself without the Lae’knaught’s belief. He faded until the only thing visible was his sword, moving in slow forms: Morning Shadows to Haden’s Glory, Dripping Water to Kevan’s Blunder.
“It cannot touch us,” the underlord announced to the hundreds of soldiers now crowding the edges of the clearing. “The Light is ours! We do not fear the darkness.”
“I judge you!” the Night Angel said. “I find you wanting!” He faded completely and saw relief in every eye around the circle, some men and women openly grinning and shaking their heads, amazed but victorious.
The underlord’s aide-de-camp led his horse to him and handed him the reins and his lance. He mounted, looking like he knew he needed to start giving orders, reasserting control, getting the men to act so they wouldn’t think, so they wouldn’t panic. Kylar waited until he opened his mouth, then bellowed so loudly he drowned out the man’s voice.
“Murderer!” Crescents of biceps and knotted shoulder muscles and glowing eyes were all that appeared, followed by a whoosh of flame as the spinning sword came alight. A soldier toppled to the ground. By the time his head rolled free of his body, the Night Angel was gone.
No one moved. It wasn’t possible. An apparition was the product of mass hysteria. It had no body.
“Slaver!” This time, the sword appeared only as it jutted out of the soldier’s back. The man was lifted on the sword and flung headlong into the side of the iron cauldron. He jerked, his flesh sizzling on the coals, but he didn’t roll away.
“Torturer!” The legion’s gentler’s stomach opened.
“Unclean! Unclean!” The Night Angel screamed, its whole figure glowing, burning blue. It killed left and right.
“Kill it!” the underlord screamed.
Wreathed in blue flames that whipped and crackled in long streams behind him, Kylar was already flipping clear of the circle. Staying visible and burning, he ran straight north, as if heading
back to the “Khalidoran” camp. Men dove out of his path. Then Kylar extinguished the flames, went invisible, and came back to see if his trap had worked.
“Form up!” the underlord shouted, his face purple with rage. “We march to the forest! It’s time to kill some wytches, men! Let’s go! Now!”
6
Eunuchs to the left,” Rugger the Khalidoran guard, said. He was so muscular he looked like a sack full of nuts, but the most noticeable lump was the wen bulging grotesquely from his forehead. “Hey, Halfman! That means you!”
Dorian shuffled into the line on the left, tearing his eyes away from the guard. He knew the man: a bastard who’d been whelped on some slave girl by one of Dorian’s older brothers. The aethelings, the throne-worthy sons, had tormented Rugger unrelentingly. Dorian’s tutor, Neph Dada, encouraged it. There was just one rule: they couldn’t do harm to any slave that would keep him from performing his duties. Rugger’s wen had been little Dorian’s work.
“You staring at something?” Rugger demanded, poking Dorian with his spear.
Dorian looked resolutely at the floor and shook his head. He’d altered his appearance as much as he dared before coming to the Citadel to ask for work, but he couldn’t take any illusion too far. He would be beaten regularly. A guard or noble or aetheling would notice if a blow didn’t hit the proper resistance or if Dorian didn’t flinch appropriately. He’d experimented with altering the balance of his humors so that he might stop growing a man’s hair, too, but the results had been horrifying. He touched his chest—now mercifully back to male proportions—just thinking about it.
Instead, he’d practiced until he could sweep his body with fire and air so as to be hairless. With the speed his beard came in, it would be a weave he would have to use twice a day. A slave’s life included little privacy, so speed was essential. Mercifully, slaves were beneath notice—as long as they didn’t draw attention to themselves by staring at guards as if they were freaks.
Slouch or die, Dorian. Rugger smacked him again, but Dorian didn’t move, so Rugger moved down the line to harass others.
They were standing outside the Bridge Keep. Two hundred men and women were at the keep’s west gate. Winter was coming, and even those who’d had good harvests had been beggared by the Godking’s armies. For the smallfolk, it hardly mattered if the army passing through was enemy or friend. One looted, the other scavenged, but each took what it wanted and killed anyone who resisted. With the Godking emptying the Citadel to send armies both south into Cenaria and north into the Freeze, the coming winter would be brutal. All the people in the line were hoping to sell themselves into slavery before winter arrived and the lines quadrupled.
It was an icy clear autumn morning in the city of Khaliras, two hours before dawn. Dorian had forgotten the glory of the northern stars. In the city, few lamps burned—oil was too precious, so few terrestrial fires tried to compete with the ethereal flames burning like holes in the cloak of heaven.
Despite himself, Dorian couldn’t help but feel a stirring of pride as he looked over the city that could have been his. Khaliras was laid out in an enormous ring around the chasm that surrounded Mount Thrall. Succeeding generations of Ursuul Godkings had walled in semicircles of the city to protect their slaves and artisans and merchants until all the semicircles of different stone had connected to shield the whole of the city.
There was only one hill, a narrow granite ridge up which the main road snaked in switchbacks designed to encumber siege weapons. At the top of the ridge the Gate Keep sat like a toad on a stump. And just on the other side of the rusty iron portcullis’s teeth lay Dorian’s first great challenge.
“You four, go,” Rugger said.
Dorian was third of four eunuchs, and all shivered as they approached the precipice. Luxbridge was one of the wonders of the world, and in all his travels, Dorian had never seen magic to rival it. Without arches, without pillars, the bridge hung like a spider’s anchor line for four hundred paces between the Gate Keep and the Citadel of Mount Thrall.
The last time he’d crossed Luxbridge, Dorian had only noticed the brilliance of the magic, sparkling, springy underfoot, coruscating in a thousand colors at every step. Now, he saw nothing but the building blocks to which the magic was anchored. Luxbridge’s mundane materials were not stone, metal, or wood; it was paved with human skulls in a path wide enough for three horses to pass abreast. New heads had been added to whatever holes had formed over the years. Any Vürdmeister, as masters of the vir were called after they passed the tenth shu’ra, could dispel the entire bridge with a word. Dorian even knew the spell, for all the good it did him. What made his stomach knot was that the magic of Luxbridge had been crafted so that magi, who used the Talent rather than the foul vir that meisters and Vürdmeisters used, would automatically be dropped.
As perhaps the only person in Midcyru who had been trained as both meister and magus, Dorian thought he had a better chance of making the crossing than any other magus. He’d bought new shoes last night and fitted a lead plate inside each sole. He thought he’d eliminated all traces of southern magic that might cling to him. Unfortunately, there was only one way to find out.
Heart thudding, Dorian followed the eunuchs onto Luxbridge. At his first step, the bridge flared weirdly green and Dorian felt his feet tingling as vir reached up around his shoes. An instant later it stopped, and no one had seen it. Dorian had done it. Luxbridge felt that he was Talented, but Dorian’s ancestors had been smart enough to know that not every Talented person was a mage. The rest of Dorian’s steps, shuffling like the other nervous eunuchs’, brought sparks out of the magic that made the embedded skulls seem to yawn and shift as they stared hatefully at those who passed overhead. But they didn’t give way.
If Dorian felt some pride at the genius of Luxbridge, the sight of Mount Thrall brought only dread. He’d been born in the bowels of that damned rock, been starved in its dungeons, fought in its pits, and committed murder in its bedchambers and kitchens and halls.
Within that mountain, Dorian would find his vürd, his destiny, his doom, his completion. He would also find the woman who would become his wife. And, he feared, he would find out why he had cast aside his gift of prophecy. What was so terrible that he wanted to throw away his foreknowledge of it?
Mount Thrall was unnatural: an enormous four-sided black pyramid twice as tall as it was wide and extending deep below the earth. From Luxbridge, Dorian looked down and saw clouds obscuring whatever depths lay below. Thirty generations of slaves, both Khalidoran and captured in war, had been sent into those depths, mining until they gasped out their last breaths in the putrid fumes and added their own bones to the ore.
The pyramid of the mountain had been sheared straight down one edge and flattened, leaving a plateau in front of a great triangular dagger of mountain. The Citadel sat on that plateau. It was dwarfed by the mountain, but as one approached, it became clear that the Citadel was a city unto itself. It held barracks for ten thousand soldiers, great storerooms, vast cisterns, training places for men and horses and wolves, armories, a dozen smithies, kitchens, stables, barns, stockyards, lumberyards, and space for all the workers, tools, and raw materials needed for twenty thousand people to survive a year under siege. And even at that, the Citadel was dwarfed in comparison to the castle that was Mount Thrall, for the mountain was honeycombed with halls and great rooms and apartments and dungeons and passages long forgotten that bored into its very roots.
Neither the Citadel nor the mountain had been full in decades and with the armies sent north and south, the place was even quieter than usual. Khaliras was now home to only the smallfolk, a skeleton crew of an army, less than half of the kingdom’s meisters, enough functionaries to keep the reduced business of the kingdom operating, the aethelings, and the Godking’s wives and concubines and their keepers.
Head among those keepers was the Chief Eunuch, Yorbas Zurgah. Yorbas was an old, soft, perfectly hairless man, even shaving his head and plucking his eyebrows and
eyelashes. He sat huddled in an ermine cloak to ward off the morning chill at the servants’ gate. Before him was a desk with a parchment unrolled on it. His blue eyes studied Dorian dubiously.
“You’re short,” Chamberlain Zurgah said. He himself had a typical eunuch’s height.
And you’re fat. “Yes, my lord.”
“‘Sir’ will suffice.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chamberlain Zurgah stroked his hairless chin with fingers like sausages encased in jeweled rings. “You have an odd look about you.”
In his youth, Dorian had rarely seen Yorbas Zurgah. He didn’t think the man would remember him, but anything that caused greater scrutiny was dangerous.
“Do you know the penalty for a man who attempts entry to the harem?” Zurgah asked.
Dorian shook his head and looked steadfastly at the ground. He clenched his jaw and, without raising his eyes, tucked his hair back behind his ears.
It was what he considered a stroke of genius; he’d given himself silver streaks in his hair, paired with slightly pointed ears and several webbed toes. They were features that only one tribe in Khalidor possessed. The Feyuri claimed to be descended from the Fey folk and were equally despised for that and their pacifism. Dorian appeared to be half Feyuri, which was exotic enough and from a group despised enough that he hoped no one would stop to think how his Khalidoran half made him look a lot like Garoth Ursuul. It also explained why he was short. “It’s the . . . other reason they call me Halfman, sir.”
Yorbas Zurgah clicked his tongue. “I see. Then here are the terms of your indenture: you will serve whatever hours are asked of you. Your first tasks will include emptying and cleaning the concubines’ chamber pots. Your food will be cold and never as much as you’d like. You are forbidden to speak with the concubines and if you have trouble with this, your tongue will be torn out. You understand?”