Way of Shadows nat-1

by Brent Weeks

  Leaving the diamond-shaped castle yard, Kylar walked up stone stairs that had been climbed by so many feet over the centuries that the middle of each step dipped several inches lower than the sides. The guards ignored him, and he assumed the attitude of a servant. It was one of his most frequent guises. Blint liked to say that a good disguise cloaked a wetboy better than the shadows. Kylar could walk right past almost anyone he knew with the exception of Count Drake. Not much escaped him.

  Soon he passed through most of the buzz of activity that filled the inner yard and the great hall. He went past the lines of people waiting for an audience in the throne room, past the open double doors of the gardens, and made his way to the north tower. The halls were busy everywhere until he stepped into the north tower’s antechamber.

  Devon Corgi wasn’t there. For the first time taking pains to be silent, Kylar opened the door that led to the stairs and climbed them quietly. The stairway was blank. Nothing decorative, no niches, no statues, no ornamental curtains or anything that would afford Kylar a place to hide.

  He made his way to the top of the tower. It was, it seemed, just a large bedchamber, currently not being used. A young man balancing a large ledger book was going through the drawers of a bureau, apparently taking an inventory of the neatly folded sheets for the enormous featherbed and the alternate curtains for the large shuttered window. Kylar waited. Devon was turned sideways to the door, and without the Talent to shadow Kylar’s approach, there was a good chance the man would see him enter.

  The waiting was always the worst. Keyed up with no place to go, Kylar began to entertain fantasies that the guard was going to come up the stairs at any minute. Seeing him here, this late, he’d search him. Searching him, he’d find the slit in Kylar’s trousers. Finding that hand-sized slit, he’d find the long knife strapped to Kylar’s inner thigh. But there was nothing for it. Kylar waited just out of sight, listening, willing his ears to hear even the scritch of the quill on the ledger.

  Finally, he checked and saw Devon disappearing into the closet on the far side of the nearly circular chamber. Kylar crept into chamber and looked for places to hide. His feet made no sound, not even the sound of leather scuffing against stone. Master Blint had taught Kylar how to boil the sap of the rubber tree to make a shoe sole that was soft and silent. It was expensive to import, and only a little quieter than properly worked leather, but to Master Blint, even the smallest margin mattered. It was why he was the best.

  There were no good places to hide. A great place to hide was one where Kylar would be able to see the entire room, keep his weapons at ready, and be able to move quickly either to strike or to escape. A good place to hide gave a decent view and the ability to strike or escape with only a little difficulty. This room had no dark corners. It was practically a circle. There were rice paper screens, but they’d been folded and were leaning against the wall. Pitifully, the only place to hide was under the bed. If Kylar were a wetboy, perhaps he could have vaulted up a wall and dangled off the chains of the chandelier, but that wasn’t an option.

  Under the bed? Master Blint will never let me live this down.

  But there was no other option. Kylar dropped flat onto his toes and fingertips crawled under the bed. It was good he was still slight, because there wasn’t much space. He was uncomfortably in place when he heard someone coming up the stairs.

  The guard. Finally. Now take a quick look and get the hell out.

  He’d chosen the side of the bed with a view of the closet, and that meant that he didn’t have a view of the stairs, but from the sound of the footsteps, he became certain that it wasn’t a guard. Devon stepped out of the closet holding a chest, and guilt flashed across his face.

  “You can’t be here, Bev,” he said.

  “You’re leaving,” the unseen woman said. It was an accusation.

  “No,” he said. His eye started twitching.

  “You stole from them, and now you’re stealing from the king, and for some reason I’m surprised you’d lie to me. You asshole.” Kylar heard her turn, and then Devon was stepping close to the bed, putting the chest down on it, his legs just inches away from Kylar.

  “Bev, I’m sorry.” He was moving toward the door, and Kylar was stricken with panic. What if Devon went after her, and she went down the steps? Kylar would have to kill both of them on the stairs, knowing that the guard would be coming along any minute. “Bev, please—”

  “Go to hell!” she said, and slammed the door.

  Wish granted. It was the blackest kind of humor, Durzo’s kind of humor. He liked to say that the irony of overheard conversations was one of the best perks of the bitter business, though he said that the wisdom of last words was highly overrated. Wish granted? Kylar didn’t like that he’d even thought that. Everything this man had planned was about to end, and Kylar was smirking about it.

  Devon swore to himself, but he didn’t follow the woman. “Where’s that guard anyway? He was supposed to be here by now.”

  This was what it was like, Durzo had told Kylar. You come in at the end of a drama—whether it’s just started or has been going on for years, your arrival signals the end—and you rarely get to know what the story was about. Who was Bev to Devon? His lover? His partner in crime? Just a friend? His sister?

  Kylar didn’t know. He’d never know.

  There was jingling on the stairs, muffled behind the door. Devon picked up his ledger. The door opened.

  “’Lo, Dev,” the guard said.

  “Oh, hello, Gamble.” Devon sounded nervous.

  “That courier find you?”

  “Courier?”

  “Little shite musta got lost. Everything fine up here?”

  “Sure, just fine.”

  “See ya round.”

  Devon waited until the guard had been gone thirty seconds, and then he stepped close to the bed and started stuffing his pockets. Kylar couldn’t see with what.

  Here it is. The guard would be far enough away now that even if Devon managed to cry out, he wouldn’t be heard. Devon stepped away from the bed toward the bureau and Kylar crawled out from beneath the bed like a bug. He stood and drew the knife. Devon was mere paces away. Kylar’s heart was pounding. He thought he could hear the rush of blood in his ears.

  Kylar did everything right. Low ready stance, advancing quietly but quickly, balanced so that if at any moment the deader reacted, Kylar wouldn’t be caught flat-footed. He brought the knife up to eye level, preparing to grab Devon and give him what Durzo called the red grin—a slash across the jugular and deep through the windpipe.

  Then he imagined Doll Girl giving him the look she’d given him when he took the biggest piece of bread for himself. What are you doing, Azoth? You know this is wrong.

  He recovered late, and it was as if his training abandoned him. Kylar was inches away from Devon, and Devon still hadn’t heard him, but the very nearness panicked Kylar. He stabbed for Devon’s neck and must have made some sound, because Devon was turning. The knife bit into the back of Devon’s neck, hit spine, and bounced out. Because of his convulsively tight grip that Durzo would have beaten Kylar for, the knife bounced right out of his hand, too.

  Devon turned and yelped. It seemed he was more surprised by Kylar’s sudden appearance than by the sting in his neck. He stepped back at the same time Kylar did. He put a hand to his neck, looked at his fingers and saw the blood. Then they both looked down to the knife.

  Devon didn’t go for it. Kylar scooped up the knife and as he stood, Devon dropped to his knees.

  “Please,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  It seemed incredible. The man’s eyes were big with fear—looking at little Kylar, whose disguise made him look even smaller and younger. There was nothing frightening about him, was there? But Devon looked like a man who’s seen his judgment come. His face was white, eyes round, pitiful, helpless.

  “Please,” he said again.

  Kylar slashed his throat in a fury. Why didn’t he protect himself? Why di
dn’t he even try? He was bigger than Kylar. He had a chance. Why must he act like a sheep? A big stupid human lamb, too dumb to even move. The cut was through the windpipe, but barely clipped one jugular. It was deep enough to kill, but not fast. Kylar grabbed Devon’s hair and slashed again, twice, slightly up, so the blood shot down rather than up. Not a drop got on Kylar. He’d done it just like Durzo had taught.

  There was a sound on the stairs. “Devon, I’m sorry,” Bev said before she even got into the room. “I just had to come back. I didn’t mean—” She stepped into the room and saw Kylar.

  She saw his face, she saw the dagger in his hand, she saw him holding the dying Devon by his hair. She was a plain young woman wearing a white serving dress. Wide hips, wide-spaced eyes, mouth open in a little O and beautiful raven hair.

  Finish the job.

  The training took hold. Kylar was across the room in an instant. He yanked the woman forward, swept a foot in, pivoted, and she flipped over onto the ground. He was as inexorable as Durzo Blint. The woman was beneath him, face down on the carpet that covered this section of floor. The next move was to slide the knife between her ribs. She’d hardly feel it. He wouldn’t have to see her face.

  He hesitated. It was his life against hers. She’d seen him. His disguise was good only as long as no one knew there was a fourteen-year-old murderer about. She’d seen his face. She had intruded on a deader. She was just collateral damage. An ancillary fatality, Blint said. A wetboy would do what needed to be done. It was less professional but sometimes unavoidable. It doesn’t matter, Blint had said. Just finish the job.

  Blint only allowed him to live so long as he proved he could do everything a wetboy did, even without the Talent.

  Yet here she was, face down, Kylar straddling her on the floor, the point of his dagger pricking her neck, his left hand twisting her hair, trying not to imagine the red blood blooming on her white servant’s dress. She’d done nothing.

  Life is empty. Life is meaningless. When we take a life, we aren’t taking anything of value. I believe it. I believe it.

  There had to be another way. Could he tell her to run? To tell no one? To leave the country and never come back? Would she do it? No, of course not. She’d run to the nearest guard. As soon as she was in the presence of some burly castle guard, any fear Kylar might inspire in her would look as small and weak as a guild rat with a knife.

  “I told him what would happen if he stole from the Sa’kagé,” she said, her voice oddly calm. “That bastard. With everything else he took from me, he didn’t even have the decency to die alone. I was coming to apologize, and now you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Kylar said, but he was lying. He had moved the knife to the correct place on her back, but it refused to move.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow shift on the stairs. He didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge that he’d seen it, but he felt a chill. It was the middle of the afternoon; there were no torches burning now, no candles. That shadow could only be Master Blint. He’d followed Kylar. He’d watched everything. The job was for the Shinga, and it wouldn’t be botched.

  Kylar slid the knife between her ribs, pulled it sideways, felt the shudder and the sigh of the woman dying beneath him.

  He stood and pulled the knife from her flesh, his mind suddenly detached, pulling away from him as it had the day in the boat shop with Rat. He wiped the red blade on her white dress, sheathed it along his thigh, and checked himself in the room’s mirror for blood, just like he’d been taught.

  It was all the sorrow in the world to him that he was clean. There wasn’t any blood on his hands.

  When he turned, Blint stood in the open doorway, arms folded. Kylar just looked at him, still hovering somewhere behind his own body, glad for the numbness.

  “Not great,” Durzo said, “but acceptable. The Shinga will be pleased.” He pursed his lips, seeing the distance in Kylar’s eyes. “Life is meaningless,” Durzo said, rolling a garlic clove between his fingers. “Life is empty. When we take a life, we take nothing of value.”

  Kylar stared at him blankly.

  “Repeat it, damn you!” Durzo’s hand moved and a knife blurred through the air, thunking into the bureau behind Kylar.

  He didn’t even flinch. He repeated the words mechanically, fingers atingle, feeling again and again that easy slip of meat parting around the knife. Was it so easy? Was it so simple? You just pushed, and death came? Nothing spiritual about it. Nothing happened. No one was whisked to Count Drake’s heaven or hell. They just stopped. They stopped talking, stopped breathing, stopped moving, finally stopped twitching. Stopped.

  “That pain you feel,” Master Blint said almost gently, “is the pain of abandoning a delusion. The delusion is meaning, Kylar. There is no higher purpose. There are no gods. No arbiters of right and wrong. I don’t ask you to like reality. I only ask you to be strong enough to face it. There is nothing beyond this. There is only the perfection we attain by becoming weapons, as strong and merciless as a sword. There is no essential good in living. Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justification. There is no justice. Do you know how many people I’ve killed?”

  Kylar shook his head.

  “Me neither. I used to. I remembered the name of every person I killed outside of battle. Then it was too many. I just remembered the number. Then I remembered only the innocents. Then I forgot even that. Do you know what punishments I’ve endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men’s most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn’t tolerate my existence.”

  He took Kylar’s hands. “On your knees,” he said. Kylar knelt at the edge of a pool of the blood seeping from the woman’s body.

  “This is your baptism,” Master Blint said, putting both of Kylar’s hands in the blood. It was warm. “This is your new religion. If you must worship, worship as the other wetboys do. Worship Nysos, god of blood, semen, and wine. At least those have power. Nysos is a lie like all the gods, but at least he won’t make you weak. Today, you’ve become an assassin. Now get out, and don’t wash your hands. And one more thing: when you’ve got to kill an innocent, don’t let them talk.”

  Kylar staggered through the streets like a drunk. Something was wrong with him. He should feel something, but instead, there was only emptiness. It was like the blood on his hands had burst from some soul wound.

  The blood was drying now, getting sticky, the bright red fading to brown everywhere but inside his clenched fists. He hid his hands, hid the blood, hid himself, and his mind—less numb than his heart—knew that there was a point in this, too. He would be a wetboy, and he would always be hiding. Kylar himself was a mask, an identity assumed for convenience. That mask and every other would fit because before his training was done, every distinguishing feature of the Azoth who had been would be obliterated. Every mask would fit, every mask would fool every inspector, because there would be nothing underneath those masks.

  Kylar couldn’t wear his courier disguise into the Warrens—couriers never went to the Warrens—so he headed to an east side safe house on a block crowded with the tiny homes of artisans and those servants not housed at their lords’ estates. He rounded a corner and ran straight into a girl. She would have gone sprawling if he hadn’t grabbed her arms to catch her.

  “Sorry,” he said. His eyes took in the simple servant’s white dress, hair bound back, and a basket full of fresh herbs. Last, he saw the gory red smears he’d just left on each of her sleeves. Before he could disappear, start running down the street before she saw how he’d stained her, the arcs and crosses of scars on her face clicked into place like the pieces of a puzzle.

  They were white now, scars now, where he h
ad branded them into his mind as deep, red, inflamed cuts, burst tissue, dribbling blood, the rough scrape and muted gurgle of blood being swallowed, blood bursting in little bubbles around a destroyed nose. He only had time to see unmistakable scars and unmistakable big brown eyes.

  Doll Girl looked down demurely, not recognizing this murderer as her Azoth. The downward glance showed her the gore on her sleeves, and she looked up, horror etched every feature not already etched with scars.

  “My God,” she said, “you’re bleeding. Are you all right?”

  He was already running, sprinting heedlessly through the market. But no matter how fast he ran, he couldn’t outrun the concern and the horror in those beautiful eyes. Those big brown eyes followed him. Somehow, he knew they always would.

  25

  You ready to be a champion?” Master Blint asked.

  “What are you talking about?” Kylar asked. They’d finished the morning’s sparring and he’d done better than usual. He didn’t even think he’d be sore tomorrow. He was sixteen years old now, and it seemed like the training was finally starting to pay off. Of course, he still hadn’t won a single fight with Master Blint, but he was starting to have hope. On the other hand, Blint had been in a foul mood all week.