Shadow's Edge nat-2 Page 3

  “You mean since you ate the last guard?” Logan asked. “You think that might have something to do with it?”

  That got chuckles from everyone except Gnasher the simpleton, who just smiled blankly through teeth filed to sharp points. Fin said nothing, just kept chewing and stretching the rope in his hands. The man already wore an entire coil of rope that was so thick it almost obscured a frame as sinewy as the ropes themselves. Fin was the most feared of the inmates. Logan wouldn’t call him the leader because that would have implied that the inmates had a social order. The men were like beasts: shaggy, their skin so dirty he couldn’t guess what color they had been before their imprisonment, eyes wild, ears alert to the slightest sound. Everyone slept light. They’d eaten two men the day he’d arrived.

  Arrived? I jumped in. I could have had a nice clean death. Now I’m here forever, or at least until they eat me. Gods, they’ll eat me!

  He was distracted from his rising horror and despair by motion on the other side of the Hole. It was Lilly. She alone didn’t cling to the wall. She was heedless of the hole, fearless. A man reached out and grabbed her dress. “Not now, Jake,” she told the one-eyed man.

  Jake held on for a moment more, but when she lifted an eyebrow at him, he dropped his hand and cursed. Lilly sat down next to Logan. She was a plain woman, her age indeterminate. She could have been fifty, but Logan guessed she was closer to twenty: she still had most of her teeth.

  She didn’t speak for a long time. Then, when the interest in why she had moved had subsided, she scratched at her crotch absently and said, “What you gonna do?” Her voice was young.

  “I’m going to get out, and I’m going to take back my country,” he said.

  “You hold onto that King shit,” she said. “Make ’em think you’re crazy. I see you looking round like a little boy lost. You’re living with animals. You want to keep living, you be a monster. You want to hold onto something, you bury it deep. Then do what you gotta.” She patted his knee and went over to Jake.

  In moments, Jake was rutting on top of her. The animals didn’t care. They didn’t even watch.

  The madness was taking him. Dorian stayed in the saddle only from instinct. The external world seemed distant, unimportant, buried under mist while the visions were near, vital, vibrant. The game was on and the pieces were moving, and Dorian’s vision was expanding as it never had before. The Night Angel would flee to Caernarvon and his powers were growing, but he wasn’t using them.

  What are you doing, boy? Dorian grabbed onto that life and followed it backward. He’d spoken with Kylar once, and had prophesied his death. Now he knew why he hadn’t also foreseen that this Night Angel would die and wouldn’t die. Durzo had confused him. Dorian had seen Durzo’s life intersecting with other lives. He had seen but he hadn’t understood.

  He was tempted to try to follow Durzo’s lives back to the first life, when Durzo had received the ka’kari that Kylar now bore. He was tempted to see if he could find Ezra the Mad’s life—surely such a life would burn so brilliantly he couldn’t miss it. Maybe there he could follow Ezra, learn what Ezra knew, learn how he had learned it. Ezra had made the ka’kari seven centuries ago, and the ka’kari had made Kylar immortal. It was only three steps to one of the most respected and reviled magi of history. Three steps! To find someone so famous who had been dead so long. It was tempting, but it would take time. Maybe months. But oh, the things he could learn!

  The things I could learn about the past while the present falls apart. Focus, Dorian. Focus.

  Clambering back onto Kylar’s life, Dorian followed it from his youth in the Warrens, his friendship with Elene and Jarl, Jarl’s rape, Elene’s maiming, Kylar’s first kill at eleven, Durzo’s apprenticeship, Momma K’s instruction, Count Drake’s softening influence, Kylar’s friendship with Logan, meeting again with Elene, stealing the ka’kari, the coup at the castle, killing his master, and finding Roth Ursuul—my little brother, Dorian thought—and as much of a monster as I once was.

  Focus, Dorian. He thought he heard something, a yell, some motion in the mundane world, but he wouldn’t let himself be distracted again. He was just starting to get somewhere. There! He watched as Kylar poisoned Momma K for justice, and gave her the antidote for mercy.

  He could know what choices a man made, but without knowing why, Dorian wouldn’t be able to guess which way Kylar would turn in the future. Kylar had already taken less obvious routes, impossible routes. Given the choice of taking his lover’s life or his mentor’s, he’d chosen to give his own. The bull had offered each of its horns, and Kylar had vaulted over the bull’s head. That was the Kylar that mattered. In that moment, Dorian saw Kylar’s naked soul. Now I have you, Kylar. Now I know you.

  There was a sudden pain in Dorian’s arm, but now that he had a firm grip on Kylar, he wasn’t letting go. Kylar ached to synthesize the cruel realities of the street with the pious impulses Count Drake had somehow infected him with. Infected? The word came from Kylar. So, like Durzo, he sometimes saw mercy as weakness.

  You are going to be damnably difficult, aren’t you? Dorian laughed as he watched Kylar dealing with Caernarvon’s incompetent Sa’kagé, as Kylar picks herbs, as he pays taxes, as he will fight with Elene, as he tried to be a normal human being. But he isn’t doing well, the pressure is building. Kylar takes out his wetboy grays, goes out on the roofs—funny, he does that regardless of the choices he makes up to this point—and then one night, there’s a knock on the door and Jarl shows up to stretch Kylar on another crux between the woman he loves and the life he hates and the friend he loves and the life he ought to hate and one duty and another duty and honor and betrayal. Kylar is Shadow in Twilight, a growing colossus with one foot planted in the day and another in the night, but a shadow is an ephemeral beast and twilight must either darken into night or lighten into day. Kylar opens the door for Jarl, futures crashing—

  “Dammit, Dorian!” Feir is slapping him. Dorian was suddenly aware that Feir must be about to do it several times, because his jaw had throbbed on both sides. Something will be seriously wrong with his left arm. He looks, confusions crashing in his head—trying to find the right speed of time.

  There was an arrow sticking out of his arm. A black-bated Khalidoran highlander’s arrow. Poisoned.

  Feir slapped him again.

  “Stop! Stop!” Dorian said, waving his hands around. It made his left arm blossom into pain. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, but he was back. This is sanity. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “Raiders,” Feir said.

  “A bunch of idiots trying to take something home to brag about,” Solon said. Something, of course, would have been Solon’s, Feir’s, and Dorian’s ears. One of the four corpses already wore two ears dangling from a necklace. They looked fresh.

  “They’re all dead?” Dorian asked. It was time to do something about that arrow.

  Solon nodded unhappily and Dorian read the story of the brief battle around their camp. The attack had come as Feir and Dorian were setting up camp. The sun was dipping into a notch in the Faltier Mountains and the raiding party had come from the mountain, thinking the sun would blind them. Two archers tried to cover their friends’ approach, but the shot was steeply downhill and their first arrows had missed.

  After that, the outcome had been a foregone conclusion. Solon was no mean hand with a sword, and Feir—mountainous, monstrously strong and quick Feir—was a second-echelon Blade Master. Solon had let Feir handle the swordsmen. He’d been too late to save Dorian taking an arrow, but he had killed both archers with magic. The whole thing had probably taken less than two minutes.

  “The pity is, they’re from the Churaq clan,” Solon said, nudging one of the black-tattooed youths. “They’d have happily killed the Hraagl clan bastards guarding the Khalidoran baggage train we’re following.”

  “I thought Screaming Winds was impregnable,” Feir said. “How’d the raiders get on this side of the border?”

  Solon shoo
k his head. It drew Dorian’s attention to his hair, which was a flat black except at the roots. Since Solon had killed fifty meisters by using Curoch—and nearly killed himself from the sheer amount of magic he’d used to do it—his hair was growing in white. Not old man salt-and-pepper white, but a snow-white that struck a sharp contrast against a face that showed a man in his prime, handsome, with olive Sethi skin, and features chiseled from a military life. Solon had complained at first that his vision was either all in wild colors or black and white from using Curoch, but that seemed to have cleared. “Impregnable, yes,” Solon said. “Impassable for an army, yes. But this late in the summer, these young men can climb the mountains. Lots of them die on the climb, or storms come up out of nowhere and wash them off the rock, but if they’re lucky and strong, nothing stops them. You ready with that arrow yet, Dorian?”

  Though all three men were magi, there was no question of them helping him, not with this. Dorian was a Hoth’salar, a Brother of Healing; his hopes to cure his own growing madness had driven him to the healers’ highest ranks.

  Water suddenly soaked Dorian’s arm around the arrowhead.

  “What was that?” Feir asked, looking green.

  “All the moisture from the blood that’s already poisoned. It should all stick to the arrow when you pull it out,” Dorian said.

  “Me?” Feir asked, the squeamish look on his face totally at odds with his huge frame.

  “You’re ridiculous,” Solon said. He reached over and ripped out the arrow. Dorian gasped and Feir had to catch him. Solon stared at the arrow. The barbs had been bent down flat so they wouldn’t tear flesh on their way out, but the shaft was covered in a black shell of blood and the poison coaxed into a crystalline structure. It had swelled the shaft to three times its original width.

  Even as Dorian was heaving breaths in and out, flows of magic began dancing in the air like tiny fireflies, like a hundred spiders spinning glowing webs, tapestries of light. This was the part that impressed the other men. Theoretically, any magus could heal himself, but for some reason, it not only tended not to work well but was also intensely painful to heal more than the smallest wound. It was as if the patient had to feel every pain and discomfort and irritation and itching that a wound would have inflicted in the entire time it was healing. When a magus healed someone else, he could numb the patient. When he healed himself, numbing anything could lead to mistakes and death. Female mages, magae, on the other hand, had no such problems. They routinely healed themselves.

  “You’re incredible,” Solon said. “How do you do that?”

  “It’s just focus,” Dorian said. “I’ve had lots of practice.” He smiled and shook himself as if casting off his weariness, and suddenly his face was animated and he was totally present with them in a way that was becoming rare.

  Solon looked bereaved. Dorian’s madness was irreversible. It would grow until he was a babbling idiot who slept outside or in barns. He would come to be totally disregarded and have only one or two moments of lucidity each year. Sometimes, those moments would come when no one was around for him to tell what he had learned.

  “Stop it,” Dorian told Solon. “I’ve just had a revelation.” He said it with a little smirk to let them know it really had been a revelation. “We’re going the wrong way. At least you are,” Dorian said, pointing to Feir. “You need to follow Curoch south to Ceura.”

  “What do you mean?” Feir asked. “I thought we were following the sword. Anyway, my place is with you.”

  “Solon, you and I have to go north to Screaming Winds,” Dorian said.

  “Wait,” Feir said.

  But Dorian’s eyes had glazed again. He was gone.

  “Lovely,” Feir said. “Just lovely. I swear he does that on purpose.”

  4

  It was past midnight when Jarl joined them in the Cromwylls’ little hut. He was more than an hour late. Elene’s foster mother was asleep in the bedroom they all shared, so Kylar and Elene and Uly were all sitting in the front room. Uly had fallen asleep against Kylar, but she jerked upright instantly, terrified, as Jarl came in.

  What am I dragging this little girl into? Kylar thought. But he just squeezed her, and when she got her bearings, she calmed down, embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” Jarl said. “The palies are …punishing the Warrens for the assassination attempt. I wanted to get back to check on some things, but they’ve sealed the bridges. No bribe’s enough today.” Kylar could tell Jarl was avoiding details because Uly was in the room, but considering how bad things were in the Warrens before the assassination attempt, Kylar could barely imagine how they must be tonight.

  Kylar wondered how much worse it would have been if the Godking had actually been killed. Violence begets violence indeed. “Does this mean the job’s canceled?” he asked, so Elene and Uly wouldn’t ask more about the Warrens.

  “It’s on,” Jarl said. He handed a purse to Elene. It looked suspiciously light. “I took the liberty of bribing the gate guards in advance. The price has already gone up, and I guarantee tomorrow it will go up again. You have the list of times when the guards we bribed are working this week?” Jarl opened a pack and took out a cream- colored tunic, trousers, and high black boots.

  “Memorized,” Kylar said.

  “Look,” Elene said, “I know Kylar’s used to doing jobs where he doesn’t know why he’s doing what he’s doing, but I need to understand this. Why is someone paying five hundred gunders for Kylar to pretend to die? That’s a fortune!”

  “Not to a Khalidoran duke. Here’s the best I’ve been able to put it together,” Jarl said. “The dukes in Khalidor aren’t the same as our dukes because the nobility in Khalidor is always inferior to the meisters. But the meisters still need people to manage the peasants and so forth, so Duke Vargun is rich, but he’s had to fight for every scrap of power he has. He came to Cenaria hoping to advance himself, but the position he thought he would get— leading Cenaria’s royal guard—was given to Lieutenant Hurin Gher, now Commander Gher.”

  “To pay him off for leading Cenaria’s nobles into an ambush during the coup, the traitor,” Kylar said.

  “Exactly. Commander Gher goes to the docks one morning a week with a few of his most trusted men to pick up Sa’kagé bribe money and pretend to be patrolling. This morning he’s going to see his rival, Duke Vargun, commit the murder of a minor Cenarian noble, Baron Kirof. Commander Gher will happily arrest the duke. In a few days or weeks, the ‘dead’ Baron Kirof will show up. Commander Gher will be disgraced for arresting a duke for no reason, and most likely, Duke Vargun will take his job. A number of things could go wrong, which is why Kylar’s only getting five hundred gunders.”

  “It sounds awfully complicated,” Elene said.

  “Trust me,” Jarl replied, “when it comes to Khalidoran politics, this is simple.”

  “How’s the Sa’kagé going to turn this to their advantage?” Kylar asked.

  Jarl grinned. “We tried to get hold of Baron Kirof, but apparently the duke isn’t too stupid. Kirof’s already gone.”

  “The Sa’kagé would have kidnapped Baron Kirof? Why?” Elene asked.

  Kylar said, “If the Sa’kagé grabbed Kirof, they could blackmail Commander Gher. Commander Gher would know the moment Kirof showed up, he’d be doomed, so the Sa’kagé would have owned him.”

  “You know,” Elene said, “sometimes I try to imagine what this city would be like without the Sa’kagé, and I can’t. I want to get out of here, Kylar. Can I come with you tonight?”

  “There’s not enough space for an adult,” Jarl answered for him. “Anyway, they’ll be back by dawn. Uly? Kylar? You ready?”

  Kylar nodded, and, grim-faced, Uly copied him.

  Two hours later, they were at the docks ready to split up. Uly would hide beneath the dock in a raft camouflaged to look like a clump of driftwood. When Kylar fell in the water, she would extend a pole for him to grab so that he could surface out of sight. There would barely be room enough in the little
raft for Uly to crouch and Kylar’s head to emerge. After he emerged, the “driftwood” would eventually drift downstream a few hundred paces to another dock where they would emerge.

  “What if it all goes wrong? I mean, really wrong?” Uly asked. The night’s cold had left Uly’s cheeks red. It made her look even younger.

  “Then tell Elene I’m sorry.” Kylar brushed the front of his cream-colored tunic. His hands were trembling.

  “Kylar, I’m scared.”

  “Uly,” he said, looking into her big brown eyes, “I wanted to tell you …I mean I wish …” He looked away. “Uh, I wish you wouldn’t call me by my real name when we’re on a job.” He patted her head. She hated that. “How do I look?”

  “Just like Baron Kirof …if I squint real hard.” That was for the head pat, he knew.

  “Have I ever told you you’re a pain in the ass?” he asked her.

  She just grinned.

  In a few hours, the docks would be swarming with longshoremen and sailors, preparing their cargoes for the rising sun. For the moment, though, it was quiet except for the lapping of waves. The dock’s private night watch had been paid off, but the bigger fear was of the groups of Khalidoran soldiers who might wander by, looking for blood. Mercifully, it seemed most of them were in the Warrens tonight.

  “Well then, see you on the other side,” he said, smirking. It was the wrong thing to say. Uly’s eyes filled with tears. “Go on,” he said, more gently. “I’ll be fine.” She went, and when she was safely out of sight, his face began shimmering. Kylar’s lean young face put on a second chin, a red beard sprouted in the Khalidoran fashion, his nose grew crooked, and his eyebrows became great, wide brushes. Now he was Baron Kirof.

  He pulled out a hand mirror and checked himself. He scowled. The illusory nose shrank a little. He opened his mouth, smiled, scowled, and winked, seeing how the face moved. It wasn’t good, but it would have to do. Uly would have helped him get the face right, but the less she knew about his little talents, the better. He started down the dock.