by Brent Weeks
“Nysos is the god of waters, right?” Kylar asked.
“What are you doing?” Hu shouted, hysterical.
“Pray,” Kylar said, his voice pitiless. “Maybe he’ll save you.” Kylar did something with Hu’s cloak. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the cloak tightened around his neck. It started dragging him across the floor.
“Nysos!” Hu screamed through the strangling tightness. “Nysos!”
The cloak pulled him into the water and for a long, blessed moment, the tension around his neck vanished. Hu kicked his good leg and found the surface. Then the cloak tightened and drew him into the gear. The disengaged gear pulled him out of the water by his throat and then flipped him over, dragging him back under the water again. He couldn’t breathe. It dragged him out of the water again, flipped him again, and pulled him back under the water.
This time, he kicked as he came out of the water. It gave him enough slack to suck in a great breath, then he was flipped and plunged under the water once more. Hu tried to fight his bonds, but any pressure he put on his shoulders was agony. His arms were tied so tightly he couldn’t pop his shoulders back into their joints and his good leg kicked against nothing but water.
He screamed again as he came out of the water, but the gear ground on. Up, down, up, down.
Kylar watched Hu Gibbet pulled from the water and then pulled under, over and over, sometimes begging, sometimes coughing up dirty river water. He felt no remorse. Hu deserved it. However Kylar knew what he knew, he knew that. And maybe it was as simple as that.
Swaying on his feet, Kylar looked for the switch to open the safe house. He hadn’t been faking his exhaustion. He was just lucky that he’d had enough Talent left to fool Hu. In a fair fight, Hu would have taken him. Kylar had no illusions about that. But Durzo had taught him there was no such thing as a fair fight. Hu let himself be taken by surprise because he thought he was the best. Durzo had never considered himself the best; he just thought everyone else was worse than he was. It might seem like the same thing, but it wasn’t.
Finally Kylar found what he was looking for. He grabbed a plank beside the rock and pulled it up.
The spinning gear slid sideways until its teeth met another gear’s. They grated for a moment, then meshed together and turned. Hu was pulled inexorably out of the water one more time. He screamed. His head caught between the great teeth of the gears and his scream pitched abruptly higher. The gears stopped, straining.
Then Hu’s head popped like bloody pimple. His legs jerked spastically and his whole body arched out of the water. Then his corpse flopped to the side and the gears turned on, blood staining the water.
The enormous rock lifted, revealing a tunnel into the earth. An alarm bell clanged in the depths.
In moments, a pair of guards thundered up the steps, spears in their hands.
“Have to …evacuate,” Kylar said. He wobbled and neither man made a move to help him. “Godking knows you’re here. Tell Momma K.” Then he passed out.
52
Feir Cousat huddled as much of his bulk behind a tree as he could. It was two hours before dawn, and the figure lying beside the fire had been still for hours. In just a few moments, Feir would know whether all his gambles had paid off.
His search for Curoch had taken him to Cenaria, through the camps of the Khalidoran highlanders, and into the mountains on the Ceuran border. His hope and his despair for weeks had been that he hadn’t even heard a whisper of a special sword. That meant if he was on the right track, Curoch might be held by a man who had no idea what it was. That scenario was vastly preferable to the idea of trying to take it from a Vürdmeister. Any Vürdmeister with the ability to use Curoch would have the ability to kill Feir a hundred ways.
What was more likely was that he was on the wrong track. He’d made a dozen guesses as he’d narrowed his list of possibilities. First, he’d taken a Khalidoran uniform and stitched messengers’ insignia on it and sat at lots of campfires. When they’d been in school, Dorian had taught him Khalidoran, so even when the conversation lapsed into the old tongue—all young Khalidorans were bilingual; the Godking thought they could better rule if they knew the schemes of those they conquered—he knew what they were saying.
Because they hadn’t immediately found Curoch, and Feir guessed rumors would have spread about that if they had, he figured someone must have taken the sword. He found the units that had done the cleanup detail on the bridge. Most of the men had been from units nearly destroyed in the fighting. Later they’d been lumped into a new unit and sent home guarding the wagons taking loot back to Khalidor—the very wagon train he and Dorian and Solon had been following.
Because Dorian had sent him south, Feir knew that the sword hadn’t gone with the baggage train. So he’d asked after anyone from those units who hadn’t gone home, and he’d found one.
Finding where Ferl Khalius had gone was an entirely different matter. In fact, Feir had never found the man. Instead, he’d followed a Vürdmeister who had been sent south. The Vürdmeister tracked Ferl Khalius and Feir tracked the Vürdmeister. He’d watched the Vürdmeister throw missiles at Ferl Khalius and the lord he’d kidnapped. The Vürdmeister lost interest as soon as the lord fell from the heights of Mount Hezeron.
While the Vürdmeister used his signal stick to tell the Godking of his failure, Feir had crept close. The falling snow and the concentration required to work magic had covered Feir’s approach. As soon as the Vürdmeister was finished, Feir killed him.
Then he’d done something he would never do again. He’d crossed the broken ledge, in the snow. He’d jumped across a five-foot gap, from slick snow to slick snow. There had been places steep enough that his feet slid back as far as he climbed. He’d ended up using magic to melt some of the ice just long enough to take a few more steps. He’d made it, but it had been close.
Curoch was worth it.
He drew his sword and stepped forward in a modified zshel posto, a fighter’s stance for keeping balance and agility on slick ground. In a few quick steps, he was over the man. His sword dipped and stabbed through the figure’s chest—a chest made of snow wrapped in a cloak.
Feir cursed and whipped around as the real Ferl Khalius charged out of the woods, Curoch held high. Feir barely had time to move. The highlander’s slash would have cut through Feir, except that he had thrown himself to one side. As it was, Curoch knocked the blade from his hand.
“Naw much honor in stobbin’ a sleeping mon,” Ferl said with a thick Khalidor accent.
“The stakes are too high for honor,” Feir said. He had thought the man had no idea he was being followed. “Give me the sword,” Feir said, “and I’ll let you live.”
Justifiably, Ferl looked at him like he was crazy: he was armed, Feir wasn’t. “Me give it ta you? This is a warchief’s sword.”
“A warchief? That sword is worth more than your entire clan and every other clan for a hundred miles put together.”
Ferl didn’t believe him, but he didn’t care, either. “It’s mine.”
Three points of white light, each smaller than Feir’s thumbnail, appeared before him and whizzed at Ferl Khalius. The man wasn’t half bad, but there was only so fast anyone could move a sword.
The two missiles that Ferl blocked with the sword blasted off into the night. The third missile went right below Ferl’s hands into his belly. Feir reached out with difficulty—magic at a distance was never his strength—and yanked the missile up. It burned a path to Ferl’s heart.
The highlander fixed his eyes on Feir and toppled sideways.
Feir picked up Curoch without elation. He’d been right. All his guesses and gambles had paid off. If anyone ever heard this story, the bards would make it a legend. He’d just recovered one of the most powerful magical artifacts ever created.
So why did he feel empty?
It had been so easy this time. Slow, but easy. Maybe Ferl had been right. It hadn’t been honorable, but when one person had Curoch, the fight was never fai
r.
But that wasn’t it, either. He’d recovered this damn sword three times—three! He could be declared the Official Finder of the Blasted Sword. He had it, but he could never use it. He was mediocre and he’d made the mistake of being friends with the great.
Solonariwan Tofusin Sa’fasti had been a prince of the Sethi empire. His Talent put him in the top ranks of all living mages. Dorian was another prince, a Vürdmeister and more. He was a magus of the kind that came along once a generation. Feir was a cordwainer’s son with middling Talent and a good hand with a sword. He’d been an apprentice smith when his Talent had been discovered, and he’d later attended the Maker’s school and then been hired as a smith and blades instructor at Sho’cendi, where he’d met Solon and Dorian.
Dorian had disavowed his birth, and neither he nor Solon had been officially granted any special treatment. But that, Feir knew, didn’t mean they’d gotten no benefit from their noble birth. No matter what happened to Dorian or Solon, they knew that they were something special. They knew they mattered. Feir never had that. He was always second place, if not third.
The signal stick flashed and Feir pulled it out. The young Vürdmeister he’d killed had kept a translation key on him. Evidently it had been the first time he’d been entrusted with a signal stick, so Feir had been able to translate the flashes of light into letters, but they were still in code, and in Khalidoran. Breaking that code was simple. The first letter was its Khalidoran letter plus one, the second was the letter plus two, and so on. But the letters were spelled out rapidly, and Feir had nothing to write on, and his Khalidoran vocabulary was limited.
The Godking was using them exactly the way Feir would have. He was coordinating distant troops and meisters. It was simple and yet an enormous advantage. His commands were delivered instantly, while his opponents had to wait hours or days for messengers. In those days or hours, situations changed, plans changed.
No wonder he’s devastated every army to come against him.
“Gather …north …of …” the signal stick flashed. Then it paused and the blue modified to red. What the hell did that mean? Feir spelled out the letters and on a hunch, transliterated them into Common. “P.A.V.V.I.L.S. G.R.O.V.E.” Pavvil’s Grove. It turned blue and went too rapidly for Feir to catch, but it repeated one section twice. “Two days. Two days.” Then it went dark.
Feir let out a long breath. He’d passed through Pavvil’s Grove on his way south. It was a small logging town that produced some of Cenaria’s only oak. There was a plain north of the town suitable for a battle. Clearly, the Godking had a plan to wipe out the rebel army there.
Feir could get there in two days. But it was still two hours until dawn. Did the Khalidorans count a day from dawn or from midnight? Did two days mean two, or three?
Feir cursed. He could break an obscure cipher in another language, but he couldn’t count to three. Great.
The signal stick turned yellow—something it had never done before. “Vürdmeister Lorus report …”
Oh, no.
The stick flashed, “Why …going …south?”
Feir blanched. So the signal sticks didn’t just communicate, they transmitted his position. That wasn’t good.
“Punishment will …when you return.” My punishment will be decided when I return? “…Lantano …rumored to be near you. Any sign?”
Feir wanted to grab his own ignorance by the neck and shake the life out of it. What was rumored to be near him?
“Vürdmeister? Lorus? Failure to respond will …”
Feir threw the stick away and scurried backward. Nothing happened. A minute passed. Still nothing happened. He was beginning to feel silly when the signal stick exploded with such force that it shook snow from the trees for a hundred paces.
Well, that’ll wake the neighbors.
The neighbors. That wasn’t a pretty thought. And Lantano? The name sounded familiar.
Feir climbed a rock hill nearby to get a better view of his surroundings. He almost wished he hadn’t. Four hundred paces to the south an army was camped, with perhaps six thousand men. The usual camp followers added perhaps four thousand to that: wives and farriers and smiths and prostitutes and cooks and servants.
The army’s flags bore a stark black vertical sword on a white field: Lantano Garuwashi’s sigil. That was the name, Feir remembered: a general who’d never been defeated, a commoner’s son who had won sixty duels. If the stories were to be believed, sometimes he fought with wood practice swords against his opponents’ steel to make things interesting.
The neighbors had definitely heard the noise, and a knot of ten horsemen was riding toward Feir right now. At least a hundred others followed.
53
Kylar opened his eyes in an unfamiliar room. It was getting to be an all-too-common occurrence. This rendition was small, dirty, cramped. The bed smelled as if the straw hadn’t been changed in twenty years. His heart raced as he prepared himself for whatever might come next.
“Relax,” Momma K said, coming to stand near his bed. It was a safe house doubtless, on the north side of the Warrens by the smell.
“How long?” Kylar asked, his voice a croak. “How long have I been out?”
“Nice to see you, too,” Momma K said, but she smiled.
“A day and a half,” a man’s voice said.
Kylar sat up. The speaker was Lord General Agon. That was a surprise. “Well, looks like the huge new wall around the city isn’t the only thing that’s changed.”
“Amazing what the bastards can do when they try something constructive, isn’t it?” Agon said. He had a crutch and moved like his knee pained him.
“It’s good to see you, Kylar,” Momma K said. “The rumors have already started about how the Night Angel killed Hu Gibbet, but the only people who know that it was actually you are my guards. They’ve been with me a long time. They won’t speak.” So his identity was safe, but Kylar wasn’t going to be distracted. He’d come too far, too fast, and given too much with only one thing in mind. “What do you know about Logan?”
Momma K and Agon looked at each other.
“He’s dead,” Momma K said.
“He’s not dead,” Kylar said.
“The best information we have—”
“He’s not dead. Jarl came to tell me, all the way to Caernarvon.”
“Kylar,” Momma K said, “the Khalidorans found out who Logan was yesterday. As best we can tell, he either was killed by another inmate because of it, or he threw himself down the Hole to avoid what the Godking would do to him.”
“I don’t believe it.” Yesterday? While I was sleeping? I was this close?
“I’m sorry,” Momma K said.
Kylar stood and found a new set of wetboy grays piled on the foot of the bed. He began getting dressed.
“Kylar,” Momma K said.
He ignored her.
“Son,” Agon said, “it’s time to open your eyes. No one likes that Logan’s dead. He was like a son to me. You can’t bring him back, but you can do some things that no one else can.”
Kylar pulled on his tunic. “And let me guess,” he said bitterly. “You two already have some ways you want to put my talents to use?”
“In a few days, Terah Graesin’s army will meet the Godking’s army just north of Pavvil’s Grove. She’ll get there first and have the advantage both of terrain and numbers,” Momma K said.
“And the problem is?”
“That the Godking’s going for it. After the Nocta Hemata, he should be twice as careful as he ever has been, but he’s walking straight into this. Kylar, our spies have only caught hints, but I’m sure this is a trap. Terah Graesin won’t listen. She wouldn’t fight until the Godking presented her with a fight she couldn’t lose. Now she has that, and nothing will stop her. All we know is that he’s doing something magical, and it’s big.”
“Don’t say it,” Kylar said.
“We want to hire you for a hit, Kylar,” Momma K said. “A hit worthy of the Nig
ht Angel. We want you to kill the Godking,” Momma K said.
“You’re insane.”
“You’ll be a legend,” Agon said.
“I’d rather be alive.” It was eerie. It was exactly what they’d wanted him to do before he left the city. It was exactly what Jarl had died to ask. Kill the Godking. Redeem all the pain and waste of his wetboy training. One kill, and he could hang up the sword, satisfied that he’d done more than his part. One kill that would save thousands. It had the feel of destiny.
“Even if Logan is still alive, it won’t be any good to save his life if you let his only chance to have a kingdom be destroyed,” Agon said. “If he’s survived this long, he can make it for another day or two. Kill the Godking and save the kingdom, then go looking for our king.”
Kylar selected weapons from the wide array Momma K had prepared for him, and secreted them about himself in silence.
“You’ll doom us all,” Agon said. “You have the kind of power I’d die for, and you won’t use it to help us. Damn you.” He turned on his heel and hobbled out of the room.
Kylar looked at Momma K. She didn’t leave, but she didn’t understand, either.
“It’s good to see you again, too, Momma,” Kylar said. He took a deep breath. “I left Uly with Elene. They’re both going to be all right. I left them with enough money that they’ll be taken care of for the rest of their lives. And Elene will love her. I did the best I could…. Jarl …” Suddenly, tears were hot in his eyes.
Momma K put a hand on Kylar’s arm and he looked down.
“I know it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “But I swore to leave this behind me. I broke that vow for Logan. That cost me Elene’s love and Uly’s trust. I didn’t abandon them so I could steal another life, but so I could save a life. Do you understand?”