Shadow's Edge (nat-2) (2 page)

But Kylar wasn’t here to kill. He was here to study a man for the strangest job he’d ever accepted. He scanned the crowd for the man Jarl had told him about and found him quickly. Baron Kirof had been a vassal of the Gyres. With his lord dead and his lands close to the city, he’d been one of the first Cenarian nobles to bend the knee to Garoth Ursuul. He was a fat man with a red beard cut in the angular lowland Khalidoran style, a large crooked nose, weak chin, and great bushy eyebrows.

Kylar moved closer. Baron Kirof was sweating, wiping his palms on his tunic, speaking nervously to the Khalidoran nobles he stood with. Kylar was easing around a tall, stinking blacksmith when the man suddenly threw an elbow into Kylar’s solar plexus.

The blow knocked the wind from Kylar, and even as he hunched over, the ka’kari pooled in his hand and formed a punch dagger.

“You want a better look, you get here early, like the rest of us did,” the blacksmith said. He folded his arms, pushing up his sleeves to show off massive biceps.

With effort, Kylar willed the ka’kari back into his skin and apologized, eyes downcast. The blacksmith sneered and went back to watching the fun.

Kylar settled for a decent view of Baron Kirof. The Godking had worked his way through half of the squads, and Sa’kagé bookies were already taking bets on which number out of each group of thirteen would die. The Khalidoran soldiers noticed. Kylar wondered how many Cenarians would die for the bookies’ callousness when the Khalidoran soldiers went roaming the city tonight, in grief for their dead and fury at how the Sa’kagé fouled everything it touched.

I’ve got to get out of this damned city.

The next squad had made it through ten men without one drawing the short straw. It was almost worth paying attention as the men got more and more desperate as each of their neighbors was spared and their own chances became grimmer. The eleventh man, fortyish and all sinew and gristle, pulled the short straw. He chewed on the end of his mustache as he handed the straw back to the Godking, but otherwise didn’t betray any emotion.

Neph glanced to where Duchess Jadwin and her husband were seated on the platform. “I examined the throne room, and I felt something I’ve never encountered before. The entire castle smells of the magic that killed so many of our meisters. But some spots in the throne room simply …don’t. It’s like there was a fire in the house, but you walk into one room and it doesn’t smell like smoke.”

Blood was flying now, and Garoth was reasonably certain that the man must be dead, but the squad continued beating, beating, beating.

“That doesn’t match what we know of the silver ka’kari,” Garoth said.

“No, Your Holiness. I think there’s a seventh ka’kari, a secret ka’kari. I think it negates magic, and I think this Night Angel has it.”

Garoth thought about that as the ranks reformed, leaving a corpse before them. The man’s face had been utterly destroyed. It was impressive work. The squad had either worked hard to prove their commitment or they hadn’t liked the poor bastard. Garoth nodded, pleased. He extended the vir claw again and crushed the corpse’s head. “Your sacrifice is accepted. Thus are you cleansed.”

Two of his bodyguards moved the corpse to the side of the platform. They were stacked there in their gore so that even though the Cenarians couldn’t see each man’s death, they would see the aftermath.

When the next squad began, Garoth said, “A ka’kari hidden for seven hundred years? What mastery does it bestow? Hiding? What does that do for me?”

“Your Holiness, with such a ka’kari, you or your agent could walk into the heart of the Chantry and take every treasure they have. Unseen. It’s possible your agent could enter Ezra’s Wood itself and take seven centuries’ worth of artifacts for you. There would then be no more need for armies or subtlety. At one stroke, you could take all Midcyru by the throat.”

My agent.
No doubt Neph would bravely volunteer to undertake the perilous task. Still, the mere thought of such a ka’kari occupied Garoth through the deaths of another teenager, two men in their prime, and a seasoned campaigner wearing one of the highest awards for merit that the Godking bestowed. That man alone had something akin to treason in his eyes.

“Look into it,” Garoth said. He wondered if Khali knew of this seventh ka’kari. He wondered if Dorian knew of it. Dorian his first acknowledged son, Dorian who would have been his heir, Dorian the prophet, Dorian the Betrayer. Dorian had been here, Garoth was sure of it. Only Dorian could have brought Curoch, Jorsin Alkestes’ mighty sword. Some magus had appeared with it for a single moment and obliterated fifty meisters and three Vürdmeisters, then disappeared. Neph was obviously waiting for Garoth to ask about it, but Garoth had given up on finding Curoch. Dorian was no fool. He wouldn’t have brought Curoch so close if he thought he might lose it. How do you outmaneuver a man who can see the future?

The Godking squinted as he crushed another head. Every time he did that, he got blood on his own snow-white clothing. It was deliberate—but irritating all the same, and there was nothing dignified about having blood squirt in your eye. “Your sacrifice is accepted,” he told the men. “Thus are you cleansed.” He stood at the front of the platform as the squad took its place back on the parade ground. For the entire review, he hadn’t turned to face the Cenarians who were sitting on the platform behind him. Now he did.

The vir flared to life as he turned. Black tendrils crawled up his face, swarmed over his arms, through his legs, and even out from his pupils. He allowed them a moment to suck in light, so that the Godking appeared to be an unnatural splotch of darkness in the rising morning light. Then he put an end to that. He wanted the nobles to see him.

There wasn’t an eye that wasn’t huge. It wasn’t solely the vir or Garoth’s inherent majesty that stunned them. It was the corpses stacked like cordwood to each side and behind him, framing him like a picture. It was the blood-and-brain-spattered white clothing he wore. He was awesome in his power, and terrible in his majesty. Perhaps, if she survived, he’d have Duchess Trudana Jadwin paint the scene.

The Godking regarded the nobles and the nobles on the platform regarded the Godking. He wondered if any of them had yet counted their own number: thirteen.

He extended his handful of straw toward his nobles. “Come,” he told them. “Khali will cleanse you.” This time, he had no intention of letting fate decide who would die.

Commander Gher looked at the Godking. “Your Holiness, there must be some—” he stopped. Godkings didn’t make mistakes. Gher’s face drained of color. He drew a long straw. It was several moments before it occurred to him not to appear too relieved.

Most of the rest were lesser nobles—the men and women who’d made the late King Aleine Gunder IX’s government work. They had all been so easily subverted. Extortion could be so simple. But it gained Garoth nothing to kill these peons, even if they had failed him.

That brought him to a sweating Trudana Jadwin. She was the twelfth in the line, and her husband was last.

Garoth paused. He let them look at each other. They knew, everyone who was watching knew that one or the other of them would die, and it all depended on Trudana’s draw. The duke was swallowing compulsively. Garoth said, “Out of all the nobles here, you, Duke Jadwin, are the only one who was never in my employ. So obviously you didn’t fail me. Your wife, on the other hand, did.”

“What?” the duke asked. He looked at Trudana.

“Didn’t you know she was cheating on you with the prince? She murdered him on my orders,” Garoth said.

There was something beautiful about standing in the middle of what should be an intensely private moment. The duke’s fear-pale face went gray. He had clearly been even less perceptive than most cuckolds. Garoth could see realization pounding the poor man. Every dim suspicion he’d ever brushed aside, every poor excuse he’d ever heard was hammering him.

Intriguingly, Trudana Jadwin looked stricken. Her expression wasn’t the self-righteousness Garoth expected. He’d thought she’d point the finger, tell her husband why it was his fault. Instead, her eyes spoke pure culpability. Garoth could only guess that the duke had been a decent husband and she knew it. She had cheated because she had wanted to, and now two decades of lies were collapsing.

“Trudana,” the Godking said before either could speak, “you have served well, but you could have served better. So here is your reward and your punishment.” He extended the straws toward her. “The short straw is on your left.”

She looked into Garoth’s vir-darkened eyes and at the straws and then into her husband’s eyes. It was an immortal moment. Garoth knew that the plaintive look in the duke’s eyes would haunt Trudana Jadwin for as long she lived. The Godking had no doubt what she would choose, but obviously Trudana thought herself capable of self-sacrifice.

Steeling herself, she reached for the short straw, then stopped. She looked at her husband, looked away, and pulled the long straw for herself.

The duke howled. It was lovely. The sound pierced every Cenarian heart in the courtyard. It seemed pitched perfectly to carry the Godking’s message: this could be you.

As the nobles—including Trudana—surrounded the duke with death in their hearts, every one of them feeling damned for their participation but participating all the same, the duke turned to his wife. “I love you, Trudana,” he said. “I’ve always loved you.” Then he pulled his cloak up over his face and disappeared in the thudding of flesh.

The Godking could only smile.

As Trudana Jadwin hesitated over her choice, Kylar thought that if he had taken Momma K’s job, now would be the perfect moment to strike. Every eye was on the platform.

Kylar had turned toward Baron Kirof, studying what shock and horror looked like on his face, when he noticed that only five guards stood on the wall beyond the baron. He recounted quickly: six, but one of them held a bow and a handful of arrows in his bow hand.

A harsh crack sounded from the center of the yard, and Kylar caught a glimpse of the back section of the temporary platform splitting off and falling. Something flashing scintillating colors flew up into the air. As everyone else turned toward it, Kylar turned away. The sparkle bomb exploded with a small concussion and an enormous flash of white light. As hundreds of civilians and soldiers alike cried out, blinded, Kylar saw the sixth soldier on the wall draw an arrow. It was Jonus Severing, a wetboy with fifty kills to his name. A gold-tipped arrow streaked toward the Godking.

The Godking’s hands were clasped over his eyes, but shields like bubbles were already blooming around him. The arrow hit the outermost shield, stuck, and burst into flame as the shield popped. Another arrow was already on the way, and it passed through the fraying outer shield and hit one closer in. The next popped and the next as Jonus Severing shot with amazing speed. He was using his Talent to hold his spare arrows in midair so that as soon as he released a shot, the next arrow was already coming to his fingertips. The shields were breaking faster than the Godking could reform them.

People were screaming, blinded. The fifty meisters around the yard were throwing shields up around themselves, knocking anyone nearby off their feet.

The wetboy who’d been hiding beneath the platform jumped onto the platform on the Godking’s blind side. He hesitated as one last wavering shield bloomed inches from the Godking’s skin, and Kylar saw that he wasn’t a wetboy at all. It was a child of perhaps fourteen, Jonus Severing’s apprentice. The boy was so focused on the Godking, he didn’t keep low, didn’t keep moving. Kylar heard the snap of a bowstring nearby and saw the boy go down even as the Godking’s last shield popped.

People were charging toward the gates, trampling their neighbors. Several of the meisters, still blinded and panicked, were flinging green missiles indiscriminately into the crowd and the soldiers around them. One of the Godking’s bodyguards tried to tackle the Godking to get him out of danger. Dazed, the Godking misinterpreted the move and a hammer of vir blasted the huge highlander through the nobles on the platform.

Kylar turned to find who’d killed the wetboy’s apprentice. Not ten paces away stood Hu Gibbet, the butcher who had slaughtered Logan Gyre’s entire family, the best wetboy in the city now that Durzo Blint was dead.

Jonus Severing was already fleeing, not sparing a moment of anguish for his dead apprentice. Hu released a second arrow and Kylar saw it streak into Jonus Severing’s back. The wetboy pitched forward off the wall and out of view, but Kylar had no doubt he was dead.

Hu Gibbet had betrayed the Sa’kagé, and now he’d saved the Godking. The ka’kari was in Kylar’s hand before he was even aware of it.
What, I wouldn’t kill the architect of Cenaria’s destruction, but now I’m going to kill a bodyguard?
Of course, calling Hu Gibbet a bodyguard was like calling a bear a furry animal, but the point remained. Kylar pulled the ka’kari back into his skin.

Ducking so Hu wouldn’t see his face, Kylar joined the streams of panicked Cenarians flooding out the castle gate.

T
he Jadwin estate had survived the fires that had reduced so much of the city to rubble. Kylar came to the heavily guarded front gate and the guards opened the sally port for him wordlessly. Kylar had only stopped to strip out of his tanner’s disguise and scrub his body with alcohol to rid himself of the scent, and he was certain that he’d arrived before the duchess, but word of the duke’s death had flown faster. The guards had black strips of cloth tied around their arms. “Is it true?” one of them asked.

Kylar nodded and made his way to the hut behind the manse where the Cromwylls lived. Elene had been the last orphan the Cromwylls took in, and all her siblings had moved on to other trades or to serve other houses. Only her foster mother still served the Jadwins. Since the coup, Kylar, Elene, and Uly had stayed here. With Kylar’s safe houses burned or inaccessible, it was the only choice. Kylar was thought to be dead, so he didn’t want to stay in any of the Sa’kagé safe houses where he might be recognized. In any case, every safe house was full to breaking. No one wanted to be out on the streets with the roving bands of Khalidorans.

No one was in the hut, so Kylar went to the manse’s kitchen. Eleven-year-old Uly was standing on a stool, leaning over a tub of soapy water, scrubbing pans. Kylar swept in and picked her up under one arm, spun her around as she squealed, and set her back down on the stool. He gave her a fierce look. “You been keeping Elene out of trouble like I told you?” he asked the little girl.

Uly sighed. “I’ve been trying, but I think this one’s hopeless.”

Kylar laughed, and she laughed too. Uly had been raised by servants in Cenaria Castle, believing for her own protection that she was an orphan. The truth was that she was the daughter of Momma K and Durzo Blint. Durzo had only found out about her in the last days of his life, and Kylar had promised him that he would look after the girl. After the initial awkwardness of explaining that he wasn’t her father, things had gone better than Kylar could have expected.

“Hopeless? I’ll show you hopeless,” a voice said. Elene carried a huge cauldron with the grime of yesterday’s stew baked onto the sides and set it down next to Uly’s stack of dishes.

Uly groaned and Elene chuckled evilly. Kylar marveled at how she’d changed in a mere week, or perhaps the change was in how he saw her. Elene still had the thick scars Rat had given her as a child: an X across her full lips, one on her cheek, and a crescent looping from her eyebrow to the corner of her mouth. But Kylar barely noticed them. Now, he saw radiant skin, eyes bright with intelligence and happiness, her grin lopsided not because of a scar but from planned mischief. And how a woman could look so good in modest servant’s woolens and an apron was one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Elene grabbed an apron from a hook and looked at Kylar with a predatory gleam in her eye. “Oh, no. Not me,” Kylar said.

She looped the apron over his head and pulled him close slowly and seductively. She was staring at his lips and he couldn’t help but stare at hers as she wet them with her tongue. “I think,” she said, her voice low, her hands gliding across his sides, “that …”

Uly coughed loudly, but neither of them acknowledged her.

Elene pulled him against her, her hands on the small of his back, her mouth tilting up, her sweet scent filling his nostrils. “…that’s much better.” She yanked the apron knot tight behind his back and released him abruptly, stepping back out of range. “Now you can help me. Do you want to cut the potatoes or the onions?” She and Uly laughed at the outrage on his face.

Kylar leapt forward and Elene tried to dodge, but he used his Talent to grab her. He’d been practicing in the last week, and though so far he could only extend his reach a pace or so behind his own arms, this time it was enough. He pulled Elene in and kissed her. She barely pretended to put up a fight before kissing him back with equal fervor. For a moment, the world contracted to the softness of Elene’s lips and the feel of her body tight against his.

Somewhere, Uly started retching loudly. Kylar reached out and swatted the dishwater toward the source of his irritation. The retching was abruptly replaced with a yelp. Elene disentangled herself and covered her mouth, trying not to laugh.

Kylar had managed to drench Uly’s face completely. She raised her hand and swatted water back at him, and he let it hit him. He rubbed her wet hair in the way he knew she didn’t like, and said, “All right, squirt, I deserved that. Truce now. Where are those potatoes?”

They settled smoothly into the easy routine of kitchen work. Elene asked him what he’d seen and learned, and though he checked constantly for eavesdroppers, he told her everything about studying the baron and helplessly watching the assassination attempt. Such sharing was, perhaps, the most boring thing a couple could do, but Kylar had been denied the boring luxuries of everyday love for his whole life. To share, simply to speak the truth to a person who cared, was unfathomably precious. A wetboy, Durzo had taught Kylar, must be able to walk away from everything at a moment’s notice. A wetboy is always alone.

So this moment, this simple communion, was why Kylar was finished with the way of shadows. He’d spent more than half his life training tirelessly to become the perfect killer. He didn’t want to kill anymore.

“They needed a third man for the job,” Kylar said. “To be a lookout and backup knife man. We could have done it. Their timing was so good. One second different and they would have pulled it off with only the two of them. If I’d been there, Hu Gibbet and the Godking both would be dead. We’d have fifty thousand gunders.” He paused at a black thought. “ ‘Gunders.’ Guess they won’t be calling them that anymore, now that all the Gunders are dead.” He sighed.

“You want to know if you did the right thing,” Elene said.

“Yes.”

“Kylar, there are always going to be people so bad that we think they deserve to die. In the castle when Roth was …hurting you, I was this close to trying to kill him myself. If it had been only a little longer …I don’t know. What I do know is what you’ve told me about what killing has done to your soul. No matter what good it seems to do for the world, it destroys you. I can’t watch that, Kylar. I won’t. I care about you too much.”

It was the one precondition Elene had for leaving the city with Kylar: that he give up killing and violence. He was still so confused. He didn’t know if Elene’s way was right, but he’d seen enough to know that Durzo’s and Momma K’s wasn’t. “You really believe that violence begets violence? That fewer innocent people will die in the end if I give up killing?”

“I really do,” Elene said.

“All right,” Kylar said. “Then there’s a job I need to do tonight. We should be able to leave in the morning.”