by Brent Weeks
The door was locked.
A small surge of Talent took care of that. The latch burst and wood splintered. Kylar carried Logan inside.
The shop had several rooms off a central waiting area. At the sound of the latch bursting through the frame, a man was emerging from one of the patient rooms where Kylar glimpsed two women talking before the physicker closed the door. A quick glance confirmed that the front door was barred, too.
“What are you doing?” the physicker asked. “You can’t break in here.”
“What the hell kind of physicker locks his doors in the middle of the day?” Kylar asked. As he looked into the physicker’s eyes, he knew the man wasn’t a criminal, but he did see something else, a warm green light like a forest after a storm when the sun comes out.
“You’re a mage,” Kylar said. He had thought that this man had simply been a front, a male physicker that Drissa Nile had used to take away the attention from her own too-miraculous cures. He was wrong.
The man went rigid. He wore spectacles, and the right lens was much stronger than the left, giving his suddenly widened eyes a disconcertingly lopsided appearance. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking—” Kylar felt something brush him quickly, try to probe him, but the ka’kari didn’t allow it. The mage never finished his sentence. “You’re invisible to me. It’s like—like you’re dead.”
Shit. “Are you a healer or not? My friend’s dying,” Kylar said.
For the first time, the man turned his bespectacled eyes to Logan. Kylar had thrown a blanket over the king to ward him from curious eyes. “Yes,” the man said. “Tevor Nile at your service. Please, please put him on the table there.”
They went into an empty room. Tevor Nile threw the blanket back and clucked. Kylar had laid Logan on the table face down. The physicker sliced open Logan’s blood- and dirt- and sweat-encrusted rag of a tunic to look at the gash on Logan’s back. He was already shaking his head.
“It’s too much,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“You’re a mage, start with magic.”
“I’m not a—”
“If you lie to me one more time, I swear I’ll kill you,” Kylar said. “Why else a hearth that size in a room this small? Why else the retractable section of roof? Because you need fire or sunlight for magic. I’m not going to tell anyone. You have to heal this man. Look at him. Do you know who he is?”
Kylar rolled Logan over, throwing away the rag of a tunic.
Tevor Nile gasped, but he wasn’t looking at Logan’s face. He was looking at the glowing imprint on his arm.
“Drissa!” he shouted.
From the next room, Kylar could hear the sound of the two women talking. “… you think? What do you mean you think? Is it gone or isn’t it?”
“We’re fairly certain that it’s gone,” a woman said.
“DRISSA!” Tevor yelled.
A door opened and closed and then their door opened and Drissa Nile’s irritated face appeared. Like her husband, she had a wizened look, despite being maybe in her late forties. Both were small and scholarly, wearing spectacles and shapeless clothes. As with her husband, Kylar saw no taint of evil in her, but there was definitely that something extra there that he thought was magic.
Two mages married to each other. In Cenaria. It was an oddity, certainly, especially here. Kylar could only believe that it was the most fortunate oddity possible. If two mage healers couldn’t fix Logan, no one could.
Drissa’s irritation disappeared the second she saw Logan. Her eyes went wide. She came close and stared from his glowing arm to his face and back again in wonder.
“Where’d he get this?” she asked.
“Can you help him?” Kylar demanded.
Drissa looked at Tevor. He shook his head. “Not after what we just did. I don’t think I’ve got enough power in me. Not for this.”
“We’ll try,” Drissa said.
Tevor nodded, submissive, and Kylar noticed the rings in their ears for the first time. Gold, both of them, matching. They were Waeddryners. If it had been any other circumstance, he would have asked them if those damn rings really did hold spells.
Tevor drew back the section of roof to let the cloudy morning sunlight in. Drissa touched the wood already stacked in the hearth and it began blazing. They took up positions on either side of Logan and the air above him shimmered.
Kylar brought the ka’kari up within him to his eyes. It was like putting spectacles on a man nearly blind. The weaves over Logan that had been just barely visible to him were suddenly clear.
“Do you know herbs?” Drissa asked Kylar. At his nod, she said, “In the great room, get Tuntun leaf, grubel ointment, silverleaf, ragweed, and the white poultice on the top shelf.”
Kylar came back a minute later with the ingredients, plus a few others he thought would be helpful. Tevor looked at them and nodded, but didn’t seem capable of speech.
“Good, good,” Drissa said.
Kylar began applying the herbs and poultices while Drissa and Tevor worked the weaves of magic. Over and over, he saw them dipping a weave as thick as a tapestry into Logan, adjusting it to fit his body, raising it above him, repairing it, and dipping it into his body again. What surprised him, though, was the way some of the herbs responded.
He’d never considered that normal plants might react to magic, but they obviously did. The silverleaf that Kylar had packed into the stab wound on Logan’s back turned black in seconds—something he’d never seen it do.
For Kylar, it was like watching a dance. Tevor and Drissa worked together in perfect harmony, but Tevor was tiring. Within five minutes, Tevor was flagging. His parts of the weaves were getting shaky and thin. His face was pale and sweaty. He kept blinking and pushing his spectacles back up his long nose. Kylar could see the mage’s exhaustion, but could do nothing about it. Critiquing a dancer was different from being able to step in and do better. That was what he wished he could do. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but it seemed that Drissa was attempting smaller and smaller changes in Logan each time, and he still had some things terribly wrong in him. Looking at him through the healing weave, his entire body seemed to be the wrong color. Kylar touched him, and he felt hot.
Kylar felt impotent. He had Talent here. Talent to spare, even after everything, he still had Talent. He willed the ka’kari back, willed himself to be unshielded, tried to will all that magic into Logan. Nothing happened.
Take it, damn you. Get better!
Logan didn’t stir. Kylar couldn’t use the magic; he didn’t know how to form any weave, much less one as complex as what the Niles were doing.
Tevor looked at Kylar apologetically. He patted Kylar’s hand.
At the contact, light blazed through the entire room. It burned beyond the magical spectrum into the visual, throwing their shadows on the walls. The weaves over Logan, which had been flagging, dimming, fading into nothing just a moment before, now burned incandescent. Heat flashed through Kylar’s hand.
Tevor gaped like a fish.
“Tevor!” Drissa said. “Use it!”
As Kylar felt the Talent flood out of him, he felt his magic all the way through Tevor being pulled down into Logan’s body. It was out of his control. Tevor was directing Kylar’s Talent completely. Kylar realized that Tevor could turn that magic to kill him, and having submitted like this, Kylar wouldn’t be able to stop him.
Sweat broke out on Drissa’s face and Kylar could feel the two mages working feverishly. They ran magic through Logan’s body like a comb through tangled hair. They touched the glowing scar on his arm—still glowing, hours later—but there was strangely nothing wrong. It wasn’t something they could fix. The healing magic moved right past it.
Finally Drissa breathed and let the weave dissipate. Logan would live, in fact, he was probably healthier than when he’d gone into the Maw.
But Tevor didn’t let go of Kylar. He turned and stared at him, eyes wide.
“Tevor,” Drissa sai
d, warning.
“What are you? Are you a Vürdmeister?” Tevor asked.
Kylar tried to draw the ka’kari up to sever the connection, but he couldn’t. He tried to ready his muscles with Talent strength, but he couldn’t.
“Tevor,” Drissa said.
“Did you see? Do you see this? I’ve never—”
“Tevor, release him.”
“Honey, he could incinerate us both with this much Talent. He—”
“So you’d use a man’s own magic against him after he submitted it to you? How do the Brothers look on that? Is that the kind of man I married?”
Tevor dropped his head and his hold on Kylar’s Talent simultaneously. “I’m sorry.”
Kylar shivered, drained, empty, weak. It was almost as disconcerting to get control of his Talent back as it was to give it away. He felt like he’d gone two days without sleeping. He barely had the energy to be excited that Logan was going to make it.
“I think we’d better see to you and your simple friend. Your wounds can use more mundane treatments,” Drissa said. She lowered her voice, “The, ahem, king should wake this evening. Why don’t you come with me to another room?”
She opened the door and Kylar stepped into the waiting area. Gnasher had curled up in a corner and was sleeping. But directly in front of Kylar was a beautiful, shapely woman with long red hair. Vi. She was staring at him down the length of a bare sword. Its tip touched his throat.
Kylar reached for his Talent, but it slipped through his fingers. He was too tired. It was gone. There was nothing he could do to stop her.
Vi’s eyes were red and puffy like she’d just gone through a wringer, though how or why Kylar had no idea.
She stared down the length of steel for a moment that seemed to stretch and stretch. He couldn’t read the look in those green eyes, but it was something wild.
Vi stepped back three measured and balanced steps, Valdé Docci, the Swordsman Withdraws. She knelt in the center of the room, bowed her head, pulled her ponytail to one side, and laid the bare sword across her hands. She raised the sword in offering.
“My life is yours, Kylar. I surrender to your judgment.”
55
Seven of the eleven rent girls had left the safe house to see if they had families they could go back to. Six had come back, weeping. Some were now widows. Others were simply rejected by fathers and boyfriends and husbands who could see only whores and disgrace.
Kaldrosa’s courage failed her; she never left the safe house. For some reason, she’d been able to face death. She’d emasculated Burl Laghar and watched him bleed to death, tied to her bed, screaming into a gag. Then she’d moved the body, put fresh sheets on the bed and welcomed in another Khalidoran soldier. He was a young man who’d always had sex first and afterward was half-hearted in the beatings and the invocation. He always seemed disgusted with himself. She asked, “Why do you do it? You don’t like hurting me. I know you don’t.”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “They have spies everywhere. Your own family will turn you in if you make the wrong joke. He knows.”
“But why beat up whores?”
“It’s not just whores. It’s everyone. It’s the suffering we need. For the Strangers.”
“What do you mean? What strangers?”
But he wouldn’t say any more. A moment later, he stared at the bed sheets. Blood in the mattress was soaking through the fresh sheet. Kaldrosa stabbed him in the eye. The whole time, even when he came after her, bleeding, roaring, furious, she’d never been afraid.
Facing Tomman, though, that was too much. They’d fought bitterly before she left for Momma K’s. He would have forcibly restrained her except that he’d been beaten so severely he couldn’t get out of bed. Tomman had always been jealous. No, Kaldrosa couldn’t face him. She’d leave with the others and go to the rebel camp. She didn’t know what she’d do there. They were inland and nowhere near a river, so jobs as a captain would likely be scarce. In fact, if she couldn’t obtain clothes that covered her up more, honest labor of any kind would be scarce. Still, after Khalidorans, being a rent girl for Cenarians might not be too bad.
There was a knock on the door and all the girls tensed. It wasn’t the signal knock. No one moved. Daydra picked up a poker from the fireplace.
The knock sounded again. “Please,” a man’s voice said. “I mean no harm. I’m unarmed. Please, let me in.”
Kaldrosa’s heart leapt into her throat. She went to the door in a fog.
“What are you doing?” Daydra whispered.
Kaldrosa opened the peep window, and there he was. Tomman saw her and his face lit up. “You’re alive! Oh gods, Kaldrosa, I thought you might be dead. What’s wrong? Let me in.”
The latch seemed to lift itself. Kaldrosa was helpless. The door burst open and Tomman swept her into his arms.
“Oh, Kally,” he said, still delirious with joy. Tomman had always been a little slow. “I didn’t know if—”
He only noticed the other women gathered around the room then, their expressions either joy or jealousy. Though he was hugging her and she couldn’t see his face, Kaldrosa knew that he must be blinking stupidly at the sight of so many beautiful, exotic women all at the same time, and all of them scarcely wearing anything. Even Daydra’s virginal dress breathed sensuality. His hug was slowly stiffening, and Kaldrosa was limp in his arms.
Tomman stepped back and looked at her. His hands flopped off of her shoulders like a fish onto the deck, spastically.
It really was a beautiful costume. Kaldrosa had always hated her skinny figure; she thought she looked like a boy. Wearing this, she didn’t feel scrawny or boyish; she felt trim, nubile. The open-fronted shirt not only showed that she was tanned to the waist, but also conspired to give her cleavage and expose half of each breast. The scandalous trousers fit like a glove.
In short, it was exactly the kind of thing Tomman would have loved to see Kaldrosa wearing in their home—for the brief interludes that extended between when she surprised him with it and when he caught her after chasing her around the house.
But this wasn’t their home, and these clothes weren’t for Tomman. His eyes filled with grief. He looked away.
The girls went very quiet.
After an aching moment, he said, “You’re beautiful.” He choked and tears cascaded down his face.
“Tomman…” She was crying too, trying to cover herself with her arms. It was a bitter irony. She was trying to cover herself from her husband’s eyes, when she had flaunted herself for strangers she despised.
“How many men have you been with?” he asked, his voice cracking.
“They would have killed you—”
“So now I’m not man enough?” he snapped. He wasn’t crying now. He’d always been brave, fierce. It was one of the things she loved about him. He would have died to save her from this. He’d never realized he would have died and then she’d have had to do this anyway.
“They hurt me,” she said.
“How many?” His voice was hard, brittle.
“I don’t know.” Part of her knew that he was like a dog crazed with pain, snapping at its master. But the disgust on his face was too much. She was disgusting. She surrendered to the deadness and despair. “A lot. Nine or ten a day.”
His face twisted and he turned away.
“Tomman, don’t leave me. Please.”
He stopped, but he didn’t turn. Then he walked out.
As the door swung gently shut, she began keening. The other girls went to her, their hearts broken anew as her grief mirrored theirs. Knowing she would not be comforted, they went to her because she had no one else who would, and neither did they.
56
Momma K stepped into the physickers’ shop as Kylar swept the sword up into his hand, but she was too late to stop him.
Vi didn’t move. She knelt motionless, her shiny red hair pulled out of the sword’s path to her neck. The sword de
scended—and bounced off. The shock of the collision rang the sword like a bell. The sword whisked out of Kylar’s nerveless grip.
“You will not do murder in my shop,” Drissa Nile said. Her voice carried such power, and her eyes such fire, that her diminutive frame might as well have been a giant’s. Even though Kylar had to look down to meet her eyes, he was intimidated. “We’ve accomplished an excellent piece of healing with this woman, and I’ll not have you spoil it,” Drissa said.
“You healed her?” Kylar asked.
Vi still hadn’t moved. She faced the floor.
“From compulsion,” Momma K said. “Am I right?”
“How did you know that?” Tevor asked.
“If it happens in my city, I know,” Momma K said. She turned to Kylar. “The Godking bound her with a magic that forced her to obey direct orders.”
“How convenient,” Kylar said. His face contorted as he crushed the tears that were rising. “I don’t care. She killed Jarl. I mopped up his blood. I buried him.”
Momma K touched Kylar’s arm. “Kylar, Vi and Jarl practically grew up together. Jarl protected her. They were friends, Kylar. The kind of friends that never forget. I don’t believe anything less than magic could have compelled her to hurt him. Isn’t that right, Vi?” Momma K put her hand under Vi’s chin and brought her face up.
Tears streamed down Vi’s face in mute testimony.
“What did Durzo teach you, Kylar?” Momma K asked. “A wetboy is a knife. Is the guilt the knife’s or the hand’s?”
“Both, and damn Durzo for his lies.”
There was a knife on Kylar’s belt, but he’d already tested its edge. Sister Drissa had blunted it, as he had guessed she might. But she didn’t know about the blades up his sleeves. Nor could she stop the weapons that were his hands.