by Brent Weeks
Durzo said nothing for a long time. He was like a caterpillar half-metamorphosed. One minute he was the old, hard-as-nails Durzo. The next he was this laughing, reminiscing stranger.
“The Wolf has worked with me for almost seven hundred years. Ezra and Roygaris were the best Healers ever. Whichever the Wolf is, he’s seen me die and come back dozens of times. He knows the magic and how exactly the ka’kari worked with my body. But he isn’t a prophet. At least not a natural-born one, unlike Dorian. So even with all his magic, he can only get bits and pieces. When I died, I think he spent a long time trying to figure out if my being alive one more time would help him or hurt him. Then he decided to raise me.”
Kylar wondered about that. The Wolf had said Durzo’s resurrection was a mystery, a gift. Was he simply being modest, or did he really not know how Durzo had come back?
“Anyway, by the time the Wolf started working on me, my body had pretty much rotted away. So I feel like a new man.” He grinned, then stirred their little fire, watching the sparks.
“So this life is different, isn’t it?” Kylar asked.
“Sometimes to love is easy, but to accept love is hard. I used to always be the man who led the charge. The Devourer steals that. Tell me, what kind of man would put his eight-year-old daughter at the spear tip of a cavalry charge? A monster. But what kind of man would refuse to fight when his enemies threaten all he holds dear? That’s why I trained relentlessly. That’s why I became the perfect killer. Because every time I wasn’t good enough, I murdered someone I loved. I thought I finally defeated love when the ka’kari abandoned me, but then there you were in the tower, standing athwart fate and crying, No! I realized three things as your crazy ass dove into the river. First, you . . . cared about me.”
Kylar nodded silently. To hear Durzo say it without scoffing was alien, and the man seemed to marvel at it himself.
Durzo plowed ahead. “I knew your regard wasn’t easily won, and I knew you’d seen darker sides of me than I’d let even most of my wives see.” He chuckled. “You know, I can ignore it when Count Drake loves me. He’s a saint. He cares about everybody. No offense, but you’re no saint.”
Kylar smiled.
Durzo studied the fire. “Second, I . . .” He cleared his throat. “I’d tried to root out feeling anything at all with drinking and whoring and killing and isolation, and I’d made myself into a monster, but I’d still failed. I still cared about you more than I cared about myself. That tells me something about myself.” He grew quiet.
“And third?” Kylar prompted.
“Third, ah hell, I don’t remember. Oh, wait. I spent years beating into your skull how hard and unfair life is. And I wasn’t wrong. There’s no guarantee that justice will win out or that a noble sacrifice will make any difference. But when it does, there’s something that still swells my chest. There’s magic in that. Deep magic. It tells me that’s the way things are supposed to be. Why? How? Hell, I don’t know. This spring I’ll turn seven hundred, and I still don’t have it figured out. Most poor bastards only get a few decades. Speaking of which . . .” Durzo cleared his throat. “I’ve got bad news.”
“Speaking of which which?” Kylar asked, chest tightening.
“Life being unfair and all that.”
“Oh, great. What is it?”
“Luc Graesin? Kid you died on the wheel to save?”
“It was more for Logan than for Luc, but what about him?”
“Hanged himself,” Durzo said.
“What? Who killed him? Scarred Wrable?” Kylar could see Momma K deciding that even a remote threat to Logan would have to be eliminated.
“No, he really hanged himself.”
“Are you joking? After what I did for him? That asshole!”
Durzo grabbed his blanket and lay down, resting his head on his saddle. “Letting someone die for you can be tough. If anyone should understand that, it’s you.”
61
. . . get up in three seconds, I’m gonna nail you with a biscuit.” Kylar struggled to open his eyes, and the voice went on without even slowing. “One, two, three.” Kylar’s eyes shot open, and he snatched the hard biscuit out of the air with such force that it exploded into crumb shrapnel.
“Dammit,” he said, combing biscuit pieces out of his hair. “What’d you do that for?”
Durzo was grinning from ear to ear. “Fun,” he said.
Kylar scowled. There was something different about his master. His eyes seemed a little more round, his skin a little lighter, the shirt he was wearing tighter across the chest and shoulders. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Eating breakfast,” Durzo said, chomping into another biscuit.
“I mean your face!”
“What? Pimple?” Durzo asked, patting his forehead, the word coming out “pimpuh?” around the biscuit.
“Durzo! You went to bed Ymmuri, and you woke up halfbreed.”
“Oh, that. What, you want to hear more? I talked last night more than I’ve talked in a hundred years.” Kylar thought he might not be exaggerating. “You need to learn everything at once?”
“You’re mortal now. And you’re old. You could keel over at any moment.”
“Hm, you have a point,” Durzo said. “You saddle the horses, I’ll talk.”
Kylar rolled his eyes—and began tending to the horses.
“You’ve tried illusory masks. I’ve seen your whole little scary-black-mask thing that the Sa’kagé found so impressive.”
“Thanks,” Kylar griped. It had been impressive, dammit. “Wait, when did you see that?”
“In Caernarvon.”
“You came to Caernarvon? When did you—”
“Too late to save Jarl, but early enough to save Elene. Now stop interrupting,” Durzo said. “You might have noticed there are some drawbacks to making masks of real faces, especially with disguises of people of different height from yours. I made some good masks in my time, but it was horrible work, and if someone touched you or it even started raining, the illusion would break. Then one time I died. Got a leg hacked off and bled to death. When I came back, as always, my body was whole. Look at yourself—dead six times and not a scar. How can that be? How could I regrow an arm?”
“I thought you said it was a leg,” Kylar said, throwing a saddle over Tribe’s back. For once, the brute didn’t try to bite him. “And what’s that about Elene?”
“It was an arm. Just remembered. I’ll tell you about Elene later. What I figured out is that somehow our bodies know what shape we’re supposed to be. I mean, when you cut any man’s arm, arm skin grows back there, not a nose or another head. Why? Because the body knows what’s supposed to be where. I figured that if that was the case, all I had to do to make a perfect disguise was change the instructions. Hah, if only it were that simple. I figured out a few things along the way. Like Ladeshians aren’t just really tanned. And if you change your height dramatically, expect to be uncoordinated for a year. And don’t mess with your eyesight. And don’t change things about your body that you merely don’t like. Pretty soon you’ll be so damn beautiful people will stop on the streets to watch you—it makes for a lousy disguise. Anyway, it took me—I don’t know—a hundred years? I have about twenty bodies I do now. That is, bodies I’ve spent enough time in that I know how they work, understand their stride, their movement, their quirks. Twenty is probably too many, but I got nervous once when I found two different paintings of me made two hundred years apart from different sides of Midcyru and obviously me in both of them. Some Alitaeran collector had the two hanging side-by-side in his study. I’d moved to Alitaera to start a new life and I was using that same damn body.”
“Wait, you’re telling me you could have chosen any face? And you chose the nasty ugly Durzo Blint face?”
“That’s my real face,” Durzo said, offended.
Blood rushed to Kylar’s cheeks. “Oh, by the God, I’m so sorry. I mean, I’m sorry I said that, not that your face is . . .”
�
�Gotcha,” Durzo said.
Kylar pursed his lips. “Bastard.”
“Anyway, it takes time to make the transition, especially when you start, and doing it halfway can be rather horrifying. We’re on the trail, so we may meet people. If the skin on the upper half of my body is blackest Ladeshian, but my legs are white, or if half my face is young and half old, folks don’t take it too well. I can actually do it much faster now, but I figured I’d show you body magic that’s merely intensely difficult before I show you the damn-near impossible stuff.”
“Wait, does that mean you can make yourself look like anything? So you could be a girl?”
“I don’t want to hear your twisted fantasies,” Durzo said.
“Hey!”
“I’ve never been a girl or an animal. I have a small fear of getting stuck: once I made a disguise that I was a man without a trace of Talent. What was supposed to be a quick, one-month disguise while I infiltrated the Chantry instead took me a decade to undo and cost me my chance to recover the silver ka’kari,” Durzo said. “Being stuck as a fat Modaini, bad. Being stuck as a woman, unthinkable.”
“So why are you changing now? And what into?”
“I’ll look like a fifty-year-old, rather affable Waeddryner count, who appears to have a small Talent that he’s never tapped. Because the reason I’m leaving the woman I love behind and going with you to the Chantry—not my favorite place—is that I want to meet my daughter. In fact, I’d appreciate your help getting the disguise right. I’d like her to look at me and say, ‘oh, I have his eyes.’”
But Kylar wasn’t interested in that yet. He paused. “Master? What does it mean? The Wolf called me Nameless. If I learn to do what you do, I’ll be faceless, too. If we can be anyone, who are we?”
Durzo smirked, and even in another face, that bemused smirk was Durzo Blint through and through. “The Wolf doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I had a delusion once that every new life I started was new. Our gift doesn’t give us so much freedom—or terror. What we are is Night Angels, of an order ancient when I joined it. What it means to be a Night Angel is a harder question. Why do we see the coranti?” At Kylar’s questioning look, Durzo said, “The unclean. And seeing them isn’t a compulsion, it’s a sensitivity. There was a time when I could see a lie, but in the year before the black abandoned me, I could barely see a murderer. What does it mean? Why was I chosen?
“Jorsin sometimes had the gift of prophecy. He told me I needed to take the black. ‘All history rests in your hands, my friend,’ he told me. I believed him. I would have walked through a wall of flame for that man. But a hundred years later, all my friends were dead, the world descended into a dark age, and no one was even pursuing me. Maybe my grand place in history, my whole purpose, was to keep the ka’kari safe for seven hundred years until I could give it to you. You’ll forgive me if that doesn’t seem entirely satisfying. Imagine rallying an army: ‘Come on, men! Let’s get together and . . . wait!’ But then again if reality is hard and flat and unjust, then it’s better to adjust to what really is than to complain that it isn’t what you wish. That was what made me lose faith in prophecies, in purpose, even in life, I guess. But having lost it, soon I doubted my lack of faith. There were niggling hints of meaning everywhere. At the end of the day, you choose what you believe and you live with the consequences.”
“So that’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“‘Choose what you believe and live with the consequences’ is all you’ve learned after seven hundred years? We’re fucking immortal, and that’s all you’re going to tell me of why?”
Faster than Kylar remembered his master could move, Durzo’s hand lashed out. His backhand cracked across Kylar’s cheek and jaw. It stunned Kylar. A backhand hurt the person who delivered it nearly as much as the person who received it, so the only reason Durzo would choose a backhand was for the contempt implicit in it.
They stood looking at each other, silent. Mixed with Durzo’s frustration, Kylar could see regret, but Durzo didn’t apologize. Apologizing was one skill Acaelus Thorne hadn’t mastered in seven centuries.
“Kid, every place I’ve turned left, you’ve turned right, and now you want me to tell you your destiny? Would it mean anything to you if I told you?”
Kylar said, “It would tell me where to turn right.”
Despite himself, Durzo grinned. But it wasn’t enough to bridge the sudden gap. Kylar could see now that his rejection of the lessons Durzo had tried to pass on had cut Durzo deeply—even if Durzo now agreed some of those lessons had been wrong. At the same time, Durzo was saying the same thing that the Wolf had told Kylar long ago. Kylar had never accepted other people’s answers: not Durzo’s bitter practicality, not Momma K’s cynicism, not Count Drake’s piety, and not Elene’s idealism. Durzo was right about choosing what you believe and living with the consequences.
“I just . . .” Kylar trailed off. “We’re immortal. We’re Night Angels. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why we’re this way, or what we’re supposed to do with it. Sometimes I feel like a god, and other times I don’t feel like I change anything. If I’m going to live forever, I want it to be for something. I mean, you can’t tell me that your destiny has been to hold the ka’kari for seven hundred years until I came along. That’s ridiculous. Terrible. It’s not good enough. You’re a great man, not a lockbox.” Kylar scowled. Gods, he’d just given Durzo a backhanded compliment—exactly how Durzo gave compliments to him.
Durzo’s little grin told him he’d noticed, but he could also tell that the compliment meant a lot to the man. In all the times Kylar had been irritated that his master never properly appreciated how well Kylar did, he’d never really thought that Durzo might want to be appreciated too. Kylar hadn’t bothered to tell Durzo how excellent he thought he was; he figured it was obvious. Maybe that was another knife that cut both ways.
“Being a lockbox wasn’t the destiny I chose,” Durzo said. “Right or wrong—or right or left—I’ve chosen to seek the ka’kari, take them, and scatter them so those who would use them for evil can’t. I don’t know if that’s what Jorsin foresaw, but it’s what I’ve chosen. Has it been meaningful and satisfying? Sometimes. I’ve had some good lives and some that were just damn awful. Now that you bear the black, I can lay my burden and my destiny down. Now I get different choices. So I’ll train you until spring and see my daughter as much as I can. Then there’s a woman I have to ask to love a man who doesn’t deserve it. Your choices? Well, that’s your shit.” He smirked, acknowledging he was being a bastard.
Kylar sighed. He loved Durzo, but the man sure was a pain in the ass.
62
From an older brother, the compulsion weave is weak, Your Holiness,” Hopper said. “It won’t hold a determined aetheling for long.”
“I know. I was the son who was able to break it when my father used it on me,” Dorian said. He’d had another dream last night, and again couldn’t remember it, but it had left him with a headache again. His Talent for prophecy was healing faster than he’d expected, but for the time being, it was useless to him. He couldn’t remember his dreams, and the only thing that banished the pain was using the vir. It put him in a foul mood.
“I’m sorry, Your Holiness. I’d forgotten.”
The plan had come together with frightening ease. Dorian was his father’s son. He’d spent days thinking about what he might have missed, and had found no flaw. “The oath is a distraction. You tell them that their reward for swearing loyalty will be choosing a concubine to marry. That will sound like a very southron thing to do, very weak. It will give the aethelings hope. Hope—and lust—will keep them from organizing a defense. After each chooses, I want him led out by that concubine past his brothers, who will be waiting in line. The women should be dressed beautifully—and of course, they should know nothing except that they are to lead the aetheling to one of the empty upper apartments. Each aetheling should be very lightly guarded, but heavily wat
ched. You understand? These are my brothers; they’re not stupid. On the way, kill them. If you have a handful of soldiers and three or four Vürdmeisters you know we can trust, that should be enough to take care of all of them—at least with the compulsion spell in place. Their faces are not to be destroyed. I will require a precise accounting and viewing of the bodies. When you’re done, isolate any of the Godking’s seed who are too young to show whether they are wytchborn. Kill them. Induce abortions on the pregnant concubines. Letting any grow up to see who’s wytchborn will give my enemies chances to smuggle them out.”
“Very prudent, Your Holiness,” Hopper said. His only expression was appreciation for a solid plan.
It was brutal, but it wasn’t cruel. Dorian took no joy in this. He would strike once to the root, and rip out much of what made this kingdom a hell for its people. This way was kinder than waiting for dozens of aethelings to coerce hundreds of others into their plots. Dorian could wait, and have executions every month for years, and his people would live in terror as dark as his father had encouraged, or he could be as brutal as the north itself, and his people would live in peace, unafraid. It would be a clean slate, a new start. Dorian would be Wanhope not for his own despair, but because those who opposed him must despair.
“Yes,” Dorian said. “Monstrous, but prudent.”
Hopper didn’t know how to respond. He bowed low. The Godking dismissed him.
It was a horror to be a god. On his wedding day, Godking Wanhope waded in blood. He’d known that his father had one hundred forty-six children, but seeing them dead and oozing and stinking, expressions frozen in death, bodies still warm, not all the blood congealed, was something else entirely. With vir, he blotted out his sense of smell as he examined the boys.
He’d run out of suitable concubines before he’d run out of aethelings to slaughter. That meant that some of the women—each of whom had witnessed the murder of an aetheling she had expected to be her new master—had to make two trips. Only those who’d been splattered with blood were excused. It had worked though, because the aethelings who’d come later were the youngest, and the least likely to pick up on a concubine’s anxiety.