Way of Shadows nat-1

by Brent Weeks

  It wasn’t high on her list of places to visit.

  “I should kill you,” Durzo said finally. They were the first words he’d spoken in six hours. He finished his beer and shoved it along the bar. It slid several feet, fell over, rolled off the bar, and cracked.

  “Oh, so you do have the power of speech?” Momma K said. She grabbed another glass and opened the tap.

  “Do I have a daughter too?”

  Momma K froze. She closed the tap too late and beer spilled all over.

  “Vonda made me swear not to tell you. She was too scared to tell you and then when she died…. You can hate Vonda for what she did, Durzo, but she did it because she loved you.”

  Durzo gave her a look of such disbelief and disgust that Gwinvere wanted to hit his ugly face.

  “What do you know about love, you whore?”

  She had thought that no one could hurt her with words. She’d heard every whore comment in the book, and had added a few besides. But something in how Durzo said it, something about that comment—coming from him!—struck her to the core. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe.

  Finally, she said, “I know if I’d had the chance for love that you had, I would have quit whoring. I would have done anything to hold onto that. I was born into this chamber pot of a life; you’re the one who chose it.”

  “What’s my daughter’s name?”

  “So that’s it? You bring me here to remind me how many times I got fucked in this stinking hole? I remember. I remember! I whored so my baby sister wouldn’t have to. And then you came along. You fucked me five times a week and told Vonda you loved her. Got her pregnant. Left. I could have told her that much was a given. That part of the story’s so predictable it’s not even worth repeating, is it? But you weren’t just any john. No, you got her kidnapped too. And then what? Did you go after her? No, you showed exactly how much you loved her. Called their bluff, didn’t you? You always were willing to gamble with other people’s lives, weren’t you, Durzo? You coward.”

  Durzo’s glass exploded against the keg behind her. He was trembling violently. He pointed a finger in her face. “You! You don’t have any right. You would have given it all up for love? Horseshit. Where’s the man in your life now, Gwin? You don’t whore anymore, so there’s nothing for a man to be jealous of, right? But there’s still no man, is there? Do you want to know why you’re the perfect whore? For the same reason there’s no man. Because you don’t have the capacity for love. You’re all cunt. You suck everyone dry and make them pay you for the pleasure. So don’t give me that bleeding heart, I-did-it-to-save-my-sister horseshit. It’s always been power for you. Oh sure, there are women who whore for money or for fame or because they don’t have any other options. But then there are whores. You might not fuck anymore, Gwin, but you will always be a whore. Now. What. Is. Her. Name?” He bit off each word like moldy bread.

  “Uly,” Gwinvere said quietly. “Ulyssandra. She lives with a nurse in the castle.”

  She looked at the beer she was holding in her hand. She didn’t even remember filling it. Was this what Durzo reduced her to? A submissive little. …She didn’t even know. She felt like she’d been eviscerated, that if she looked down, she’d see ropes of her own intestines coiled around her feet.

  It took all of her strength to spit in the beer and set it on the counter with even a shadow of nonchalance.

  “Well, it’s tough to be a victim of circumstance,” Durzo said. His voice had that killing edge on it.

  “You aren’t…. You wouldn’t kill your own child.” Not even Durzo could do that, could he?

  “I won’t have to,” Durzo said. “They’ll kill her for me.”

  He picked up the beer, smiled at Gwinvere over the spit, and drank. He finished half the beer at a gulp and said, “I’m leaving. It smells like old whore in here.” He poured the rest of his beer onto the floor and set the glass carefully on the bar.

  Kylar woke two hours before dawn and briefly wondered if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep. The correct answer, however, was unavoidable, so after a few minutes, he dragged himself out of bed. He dressed quietly in the dark, reaching into his third drawer where his wetboy grays were folded as always and reaching into his ash jar to smear his features black.

  In the past nine years, he’d learned to compensate for not having the Talent. When Blint was in an optimistic mood, which was increasingly rare, he praised Kylar for it. He said that too many wetboys relied on their Talent for everything and that he kept his mundane talents honed for unpredictable situations. In the bitter business, unpredictable situations were the norm. Besides, Blint said, if there’s almost no noise of a footstep to cover in the first place, you don’t have to use as much of your Talent to muffle it.

  Sometimes Kylar’s adaptability showed itself in more spectacular ways, but mostly it was in these little things, like putting his grays in the same dresser, the same way every time he washed them. At least, he hoped it was his adaptability and not Blint’s mania for organization infecting him. Seriously, what was it with the man’s locking locks three times and spinning knives and the garlic and the Night Angel this and Night Angel that?

  The window opened silently and Kylar crept across the roof. Years of practice taught him where he could walk and where he had to crawl to be unheard by those below. He slipped over the edge of the house, dropped onto the flagstones in the courtyard, and vaulted off a rock to grab the edge of the wall. He raised himself to peek over the edge, saw no one, pulled himself over the wall, and then moved stealthily up the street.

  He probably could have just walked; sneaking wasn’t really necessary once he got out of sight of the Drake’s home and until he got within sight of the herbiary, but it was a bad habit to get into. A job is a job, it isn’t done till it’s done. Another of Blint’s pearls, there. Thanks.

  Tonight, it wasn’t just Blint’s ingrained discipline that kept him creeping from shadows to shadow, making the two-mile walk to the herbiary take almost an hour. Tonight, Jarl’s words kept going through his head. “You have enemies. You have enemies.”

  Maybe it was time he moved out of the Drakes’ house. For their safety. He was twenty years old, and though of course he didn’t have the income of a noble, Blint was more than generous with his wages. In fact, Blint didn’t really care about money. He didn’t spend much on himself, aside from the infrequent binges on alcohol and rent girls. He did buy the best equipment and ingredients for poisons, but what he bought he kept forever. With what he made for each kill and the frequency with which he took jobs, Blint had to be wealthy. Probably obscenely wealthy. Not that Kylar cared. He’d adopted much of Blint’s attitude. He gave Count Drake a portion of his wages for Elene and still had plenty left over. He kept some in coins and jewels and split the rest between investments Momma K and Logan made for him. It meant nothing to him because money couldn’t buy him anything. His cover as a poor country noble and his real work as a journeyman wetboy kept him from living a lifestyle that would attract attention. So even if he had wanted to spend his money, he couldn’t afford to.

  He could move out, though. Rent a small home further south on the east side, at the edges of one of the less fashionable neighborhoods. Blint had told him that if you bought the cheapest house in a neighborhood, no matter how expensive the neighborhood, you were invisible. Even if your neighbors noticed you, they’d take pains not to notice you.

  Then Kylar was at the shop. The Sa’kagé had long had an arrangement with herbalists in the city. The herbalists made sure they kept certain plants on hand that weren’t strictly legal, and the Sa’kagé made sure that the herbalists’ shops were never burglarized. The crown knew about it but was powerless to stop it.

  Goodman Aalyep’s Herbiary was frequented by rich merchants and the nobility, so he had refused to keep illicit herbs openly in his shop, fearing that such defiance in the very face of authority might not be ignored. He’d been able to refuse the Sa’kagé, bu
t no one refused Master Blint. Goodman Aalyep supplied Durzo with the rarest herbs. In return, Master Blint made sure no one else in the Sa’kagé so much as went near his shop.

  It fell to Kylar to gather the necessaries and drop off the money, which he was doing tonight. The benefit to running these errands wasn’t only that he learned the trade, or that he established relationships with the people who would supply him in the future, it was also that he could build his own collection. An elaborate collection like Master Blint’s took years and thousands or even tens of thousands of gunders to build.

  The bad part was losing sleep. It didn’t do for a young noble to sleep until noon unless he’d been out carousing with his friends. So even though he wouldn’t get home until almost dawn, Kylar would have to wake with the sun.

  He grumbled silently, remembering a time when sneaking through the streets of Cenaria at night had been fun.

  The back door of the shop, as always, was locked. Goodman Aalyep kept good locks on his doors, too. Though he’d never met him—they only wrote notes—Kylar felt he knew Goodman Aalyep, and the man was a strange one. With Durzo Blint’s protection in the Sa’kagé, the man could have safely left his doors wide open. No one in the city would dare steal from him.

  But as Blint said, a man’s greatest treasures are his illusions. For all the man claimed to hate teaching, he seemed to have an aphorism for every occasion. Kylar selected the proper pick and anchor from the kit on the inside of his belt, and he knelt in front of the door and started working. He sighed. It was a new lock, and from Master Procl’s, the best locksmith in the city. New locks, even if they weren’t high quality, always tended to be tighter, and if losing an anchor wasn’t the end of the world, it was still irritating to break one.

  Kylar raked the pick over the pins. Four pins, two of them a little loose. That meant it was the work of one of Procl’s journeymen and not the master himself. In ten seconds, he turned the anchor, bending it, and the door opened. Kylar cursed silently—he’d have to get another new anchor—then tucked his tools away. Someday, he was going to have to commission a set of mistarille picks and anchors like Master Blint had. Or at least one anchor. Mistarille would flex but never break, but it was more expensive by weight than diamonds.

  Goodman Aalyep’s claim that his business was an herbiary wasn’t an idle boast. It had three rooms: the large comfortable shop with labeled glass jars for the display of herbs, a tiny office, and the herbiary in which Kylar stood. The little room was humid, and the wet, fecund odors were almost overwhelming.

  Checking on the progress of some fungi, Kylar was pleased. Several lethal mushrooms would be ready within a week. Mushrooms were one kind of plant Goodman Aalyep could grow with impunity in his shop—lethal varieties were indistinguishable from edible mushrooms to anyone except trained herbalists and, of course, trained poisoners.

  Treading carefully so he didn’t step on any of the boards that creaked, Kylar moved through the rest of the herbiary, judging the plants with a practiced eye. Kylar lifted the third plant box in the second row and saw six bundles carefully packed in individual lambskin pouches. He lifted them out and checked that each was what he had ordered. Four bundles for Master Blint, and two for himself. Kylar put the herbs in the pack secured flush against his back under his cloak, and put the purse with Aalyep’s money into the little space. He set the planter back in position.

  Then something felt wrong. In the blink of an eye Kylar drew two short swords.

  But he didn’t move a step. The feeling of wrongness continued, not something wrong of itself, but just something here and now and close. There was no sound. There was no attack, just a slight pressure, as of the softest possible touch of a finger.

  Kylar focused on the sensation even as his eyes scanned the shop and his ears strained to hear the slightest sound. It was like a touch, but it was pressing past him, toward—

  The lock on the back door clicked home. He was trapped.

  34

  Restraining an impulse to run to the door and fling it open, Kylar stayed utterly still. No one was in the room with him. Of that he was certain. But he thought—yes, he could hear someone breathing in the shop.

  Then he realized that it was more than one person. One was breathing quickly, shallowly, excited. The other was breathing lightly but slowly. Not tense, not excited. That scared Kylar.

  Who could ambush a wetboy and not even be nervous?

  Afraid of losing all initiative, Kylar moved slowly toward the wall that separated the herbiary from the shop. If he was right, one of the men was standing just on the other side of it. Sheathing a short sword—to be silent he had to do it so slowly that it was painful—Kylar then drew out the Ceuran hand-and-a-half sword he carried in a back scabbard.

  He brought the tip of the blade close to the wall and waited for the slightest sound.

  There was nothing. Now he couldn’t even hear the excited man breathing. That meant the excited one must be on the other side of this wall, while the calm man was further.

  Kylar waited. He trembled with anticipation. One of the men on the other side of the entry was a wytch. Were they with the Khalidorans Jarl had warned him about? Kylar pushed the thought out of his head. He could worry about that later. Whoever they were, they had trapped him. Whether they thought he was Master Blint or just a common thief didn’t matter.

  But which one was the wytch? The nervous one? He wouldn’t have thought so, but the feeling that had pressed past him and had locked the door had seemed to come from that side.

  A board creaked. “Feir! Back!” the man further away from Kylar shouted. Kylar rammed his sword through the finger-thick pine.

  He yanked the sword back as he charged through the entry. He burst through the curtain and launched himself off the doorpost and over the sales counter, toward the man he’d tried to stab.

  The man was on the ground, rolling over as Kylar took a slice at his head. He was huge. Bigger even than Logan, but proportioned like a tree trunk, thick everywhere, with no definable waist or neck. For all that, even on his back, he was bringing up a sword to block Kylar’s blow.

  He would have blocked it, too, if Kylar’s sword had been whole. But half of Kylar’s Ceuran blade was lying on the ground by the man, sheared off with magic a moment after he had rammed it through the wall.

  Finding no sword where he expected it, the big man’s parry went wide as Kylar attacked from his knees. Without the full weight of the blade, Kylar brought his half-sword down faster than the big man could react and stabbed for his stomach.

  Then Kylar felt as if his head were inside the soundbow of a temple bell. There was a concussion, pitched low but focused, as if a cornerstone had fallen two stories and landed an inch from Kylar’s head.

  The force blew him sideways through one shelf of herb jars and into a second, sending them crashing down underneath him.

  Then there was nothing but the light flashing in front of Kylar’s eyes. His sword was gone. He blinked, vision slowly returning. He was face down on the floor with a shattered shelf, lying amid the remnants of broken jars and scattered herbs.

  He heard a grunt from the big man, and then footsteps. Kylar kept still, not having to fake much to appear incapacitated. A few inches from his nose, he was slowly able to make out some of the plants. Pronwi seed, Ubdal bud, Yarrow root. This shelf should have—and there it was, near his hand, delicate Tuntun seed, ground to powder. If you breathed it, it would make your lungs hemorrhage.

  The footsteps came closer and Kylar lurched, spinning to one side and flinging Tuntun powder in an arc. He came to his feet and drew a pair of long knives.

  “Enough, Shadowstrider.”

  Air congealed around Kylar like a jelly. He tried to dive away, but the jelly became as hard as rock.

  The two men regarded Kylar through the cloud of Tuntun seed hanging frozen in the air.

  The blond mountain folded meat-slab arms across his chest. “Don’t tell me you expected this, Dorian,” he
growled at the other man.

  His friend grinned.

  “Not much to look at, is he?” the Mountain asked.

  The smaller man, Dorian, wore a short black beard under intense blue eyes, had a sharp nose and straight white teeth. He reached forward and took some of the floating Tuntun powder between two fingers. Black hair lightly oiled, blue eyes, pale skin. Definitely Khalidoran. He was the wytch. “Don’t be a sore loser, Feir. Things would gone badly for you if I hadn’t broken his sword.”

  Feir scowled. “I think I could hold my own.”

  “Actually, if I hadn’t intervened, right now he’d be wondering how he was going to move such a large corpse. And that was without his Talent.”

  That got an unhappy grunt. The smaller man waved a hand and the Tuntun powder fell to the ground in a tidy pile. He looked at Kylar and the bonds holding him shifted, forcing him to stand upright, with his hands down at his sides, though still holding the knives. “Is that more comfortable?” he asked, but didn’t seem to expect a reply. He touched Kylar’s hand with a single finger and stared into him as if his eyes were cutting him open. He frowned. “Look at this,” he said to Feir.

  Feir accepted the hand Dorian put on his shoulder and stared at Kylar the same way. Kylar stood there, not knowing what to say or do, his mind filled with questions that he wasn’t sure he should give voice to.

  After a long moment, Feir said, “Where’s his conduit? It almost seems shaped, like there’s a niche for …” He exhaled sharply. “By the Light, he ought to be …”

  “Terrifying. Yes,” Dorian said. “He’s a born ka’karifer. But that’s not what worries me. Look at this.” Kylar felt something twist in him. He felt as if he were being turned inside out.

  Whatever he was seeing, it scared Feir. His face was still, but Kylar could almost feel the sudden tension in his muscles, the slight tang of fear in the air.