“Here,” a voice whispered.
Gaelan whipped around, daggers coming out, dropping low. There was nothing where the voice had come from.
Something slammed into the back of his knee and swept him off his feet. He fell, tumbling down the steep roof. The daggers went flying as his fingertips fought for purchase on the slate tiles.
He fell off the roof. He swung his hands, expecting a gutter—some kind of edge. Nothing. There were only a few decorative dog gargoyles. He reached. Missed.
Phantom hands made of pure magic whipped out beyond his own fingers and snagged the gargoyle. He pulled so hard he ripped it right off—and threw himself back up and onto the roof.
He landed in a fighting stance, a Plangan style, almost ludicrously low, but helpful with the steep pitch of the roof here in case he had to use his hands.
But Ben Wrable was standing, arms folded, chuckling.
“Looks like you don’t know everything yet, sword swinger.”
“You can throw your voice,” Gaelan said.
Ben smiled.
“You won’t catch me like that again,” Gaelan vowed.
Ben walked over to the edge, looked down at where the dog gargoyle lay shattered far below. A crowd had gathered, alarmed, looking up. “Enough entertainment for the locals.”
* * *
“Where’d you pick up this style?” Gaelan asked as they sparred the next night. Ben Wrable’s style with the staff reminded him of Peerson Jules, one of the last non-crazy Lae’knaught underlords. That had been two hundred years ago.
“Made it up,” Ben said. “My own master only did bladed weapons.” He grabbed a pair of sais off the wall and slowly faded from sight. Embracing the shadows, he called it. In bright light, it reduced him to a man-size smudge of inky blackness—nothing close to invisibility, nothing close to what Gaelan could do with the aid of his ka’kari—but on a dark night it was pretty damn good.
He could muffle his steps, too.
They trained with every weapon imaginable. Ben was fast, and Gaelan was a fast learner. Ben was obviously impressed with the warrior, though Gaelan tried to hide some of his more impressive skills. Ben also mentioned other wetboy skills that he himself didn’t practice and gave Gaelan an enormous tome of poisons: “My master had, uh, an accident before he could teach me most of this, and I’m a bad reader.”
“That’s awfully generous.”
“Don’t worry. I’m charging Gwinvere for it.”
Ah. Ben couldn’t read the coded notations, so the book was worthless to him, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could fence. Who’d buy it? If someone did, they might be your enemy. Far better to charge a friend full price and make it their problem. Clever.
Ben wasn’t much help with disguises, though, saying with his scars he wasn’t going to pass as anything other than himself.
He watched Gaelan shoot the bow, nailing a bull’s-eye ten times in a row from a hundred paces—Gaelan was justly famous for his archery—and said, “Looks like we won’t need to cover that.”
Gaelan couldn’t master the art of throwing his voice, though. Ben could mimic voices perfectly, as well—something Gaelan was certain was akin to the more massive sorts of body magic he himself did.
Teaching Ben a few of his own tricks would have been only fair, but much as Gaelan liked Ben, the man was a stone killer. Gaelan wasn’t going to teach a wetboy those abilities.
One day, two weeks in, they were fighting sickle against chain spear. They’d been working for ten hours, sweating copiously from the fire they kept going in the room to refill their Talents. Ben threw off his tunic and Gaelan saw the rest of the man’s scars for the first time.
The Friaki were much more likely to scar with keloids than people of other nations: their bodies pushing scars outward, giving them a raised appearance. Ben Wrable was covered with self-inflicted keloid scars from his neck to his fingertips.
“I was a gorathi’s son. A prince, if you will. I was kidnapped as a young boy from my clan. A great insult to my father. In Friaku, a son is his father’s strength. I was brought here and sold into the Death Games, where I excelled. When I won my freedom, I went back to Friaku, but my clan had been massacred long ago. No one knew their names. For all I know, the slave traders lied, and I’m just a peasant’s son. I’ll never know.”
The Friaki had a taboo against speaking about the dead. Ben might have spoken to his own uncle, and if he hadn’t approached the subject just the right way, the man would have denied knowing anything. Not having been raised there, Ben wouldn’t have known.
“What’s that one for?” Gaelan asked. Most of the scars appeared to be gibberish. Designs interspersed with guesses at Friaki script. In the center of his chest, though, he had cut a large circle, split halfway by a single line, straight down his sternum. That scar had been cut and recut many times.
“I had a pendant, made of two iron horseshoe nails. It was taken from me when I came to train for the Death Games. I cut it into myself so I’d never forget. No one I spoke to in Friaku had seen it before. Have you?”
“No,” Gaelan lied. Ben Wrable was a man cut off from a home he would never know. A man who’d been destroyed while still a child. A man trying to hold on to one small thing, driven near madness trying to hold on to his Friaki identity, because he sure as hell didn’t belong anywhere else.
Besides, referents change, especially the referents of universal symbols like lines and circles. And it had been a long time since Gaelan had lived in Friaku.
But the truth was Gaelan just didn’t have the heart to tell Ben what it really meant.
* * *
There is no heroism.
There is no justice.
There is no heaven.
Gaelan wasn’t dressed in black. It wasn’t night. He wore a plain blue tradesman’s tunic and a big, worn hat, and he had his cloak draped over his lap. He was sitting on the ruined base of an old statue—long since torn down—and eating a loaf of bread and cutting sausage to go with it. The sun was going down, and this Warrens market bordering the Plith River was beginning to close for the day. A few stalls would stay open for another hour or so, hawking hot food for those heading home. But the boat shops that came and docked and sold their wares were already pushing off, not willing to spend the night docked in the crime-ridden Warrens.
It was busy, but not packed. Gaelan saw his target enter the market from the far side. He was a plain man, could have been a tradesman himself. But Gwinvere’s sketch had been very good. It was the wetboy, Nils Skelling. He was reputed to be the best man alive with an axe, despite his small stature. Great climber. Fearless swimmer. Excellent in unarmed combat, said to have killed fifteen Lae’knaught Lancers with his bare hands. Said to have quite a sense of humor, too. Nils was walking along the edge of the pier. The crowd tended to be thinner there, because sometimes when the crowd suddenly swelled, those at the edge would get pushed into the sewage-befouled water.
A wetboy wasn’t worried about such a thing.
There is no sixth sense.
There is no hell but life, and death is worse.
Gaelan coughed a few times, pounded his chest, and walked, still eating, cutting a piece of sausage. Among the bustling, wheezing, sniffling masses, he might as well have been invisible.
The wetboy passed between Gaelan and the water. In his eyes, Gaelan saw murder. It was enough. Gaelan slammed the knife into the man’s kidney. A lethal blow, and so painful you couldn’t cry out. In an instant, with the hand under his folded cloak, Gaelan clipped a lead weight to the wetboy’s belt, and with a hand of magic, he propelled the man gently toward the water.
Still walking purposefully, putting distance between them, Gaelan faked another loud coughing fit to draw attention to himself as the wetboy sank to his knees, and slipped right off the pier into the water. The slight sound of him hitting the waves was covered by Gaelan’s coughing. The weights dragged the body into the depths. And it was done.
There is
no glory.
There is no light.
There is only victory.
* * *
“You can’t tell me once you start killing,” Ben Wrable said. “I’m still bound by my oath to the Shinga. If I know of a direct threat, I’ll have to go report it. You understand? Not ‘I’ll have to do it because I’m so honorable’—it’s a magical compulsion.”
Clever Ben Wrable, he knew exactly the bounds of his compulsion, and with Gaelan, he was pressing right against them.
“If the Shinga orders it, I’ll have to try to kill you, Gaelan. So you need to do your business before they even know it. I won’t have taught you everything, but if you’re successful, I can teach you the rest at our leisure. I report to the Shinga in two weeks. He doesn’t always remember to do so, but if he asks if I know of any threats to him, I’ll have to answer honestly.”
“Fair enough.” Two weeks. So the water clock was grinding away. Good. Gaelan liked to feel the press of time. It had been too long.
* * *
Like most of the wetboys, Polus Merit worshipped Nysos, the god of blood, semen, and wine. He was already half drunk when Gaelan ran into him in the brothel. He was a big man, fatter than you’d expect a wetboy to be. But then, his specialty was poisons. And claymores.
Another product of the Death Games. He’d been an apothecary who got too far into debt to the wrong people and had been forced into slavery, along with his wife and children. They hadn’t made it—Gaelan knew no more than that, and didn’t want to. When Polus had been pushed into the Death Games, no one thought he’d last a day. But he’d taken to it with relish. Now, he was forty-five, bald, paunchy. Still powerful under the fat, and with a massive Talent.
He took a deep drink of a Sethi red, looked down the bar at Gaelan. “You’ve got a dangerous look about you,” Polus said.
“Bugger off. You’re not my type,” Gaelan said. He had seen the man’s eyes. There was murder-guilt there. It was enough.
Polus scooted to a seat closer to Gaelan. “You know how other gifts sometimes come along with the Talent?”
“Hey, fuck off.”
“I got a bit of prophecy. Not enough to be useful, you know. Just glimpses. My wife dead, things like that to keep me up late at night. I had this vision that I was going to be killed by forty men, all at once. Queer, huh? But now that you’re here, I see they’re just you. Durzo Blint.”
What? That wasn’t a name Gaelan had ever had. It wasn’t a name he’d ever even heard.
Polus Merit chuckled quietly, drunkenly. “Don’t suppose I could stop you. You know, it’s foretold now and all.” He grinned. “Worse times to go, I guess. My favorite girl was working tonight. She did me right. This wine could have been better, but, meh.” Polus shrugged, pulled out his coin purse, put it on the bar and waved to the server, a woman in low-cut dre “See this all gets to Anesha, would you?”
“You drunk, Polus?” the server asked.
He smiled at her. Shook his head.
When she left, Polus turned back to Gaelan. “I don’t ask you to make it fair. Gods know I don’t deserve that. But I’d appreciate it if you make it quick.”
Gaelan looked at him like he was crazy. But he felt transfixed. A talent in prophecy. If the man started shouting everything he saw, Gaelan could be wrecked instantly. Forty men in one. Who could that be but an immortal?
“I’m going to go for a walk,” Polus said. “Down along the river.” He got up.
After the man left, Gaelan went out the back way quickly, in case Polus was setting up an ambush in front or in back. The man wasn’t there. Gaelan made it up to the rooftops, jumping from wall to wall. He strung his long bow and checked his arrows.
True to his word, Polus Merit was walking slowly, not two blocks away, along the edge of the Plith. A quiet section where it would be easy to dispose of the body. A hundred paces away.
~You’re better than this. This isn’t you, Acaelus.~
It is now. Half a breath out, the blessed stillness before murder.
He released the arrow. Perfect shot, base of the skull. Instant death. Polus crumpled.
When he went to roll the body into the river, Gaelan found a note in Polus’s hand. It had just two words: “Thank you.”
* * *
Nigh unto seven centuries ago, there was a magical conflagration at the Fall of Trayethell, the Battle of the Black Barrow. Magic to blot out the sun, to rend the earth. Magic seen two hundred leagues away, and felt across the oceans.
It was said that on that last day, having lost friends, wife, and battle, and hope, the Emperor Jorsin Alkestes took up the two greatest magical artifacts ever made or found. He was the first and only man ever to hold both at once. With them, his magical abilities, already legendary, were amplified a thousandfold. He took in all the power of Iures and Curoch—and it killed him.
But it didn’t kill him alone.
* * *
“What do you know of the ka’kari?” I ask Yvor Vas, draining my fourth ale.
“I know about them,” the freckled idiot says. “Otherwise why would I be talking with you? And you know everything about them, so why are you asking?”
“I know what I know. What I don’t know is what you think you know. And if you use that tone again, you’ll be picking it up from the floor.”
“What tone?” Yvor asks, petulant.
My fist crosses the boy’s jaw. He flies off his stool and lands flat on the floor. Most satisfying.
“That tone,” I say.
“You broke my fucking tooth!” the boy complains. His lips are bleeding.
“My knuckles, on the other hand, are pristine. Odd.”
Hot, barely restrained rage flares in his eyes. The boy picks himself up and takes a moment to master his anger. I watch his eyes closely. Finally, he says, “There were six ka’kari. One for each of Emperor Jorsin Alkestes’ Champions of Light. They were created by Jorsin’s archmage, Ezra, during the Battle of Black Barrow. The Society of the Second Sun believes they confer immortality—the bearers of the ka’kari can still be killed, but if not killed, you live forever. Maybe not forever, but at least seven hundred years, which seems close enough to me. Most in the Society believe that you were originally Shrad Marden, bearer of the blue ka’kari, friend of Jorsin Alkestes.”
Friend? Did you have friends, Jorsin? I thought I was one, but now I’m not so sure. “And you? What do you believe?”
“I think you were and are Eric Daadrul, the bearer of the silver ka’kari. Impervious to blades and able to form them in your hands by thought alone.”
* * *
“There’s a small rumor that Polus Merit might be dead,” Gwinvere Kirena said. “Something about him giving a fortune to one of my girls.” They were in one of her houses, in a small, well-appointed library. She was wearing a casual blue dress that still managed to accentuate her curves.
“Can you hush it up?” Gaelan asked.
“This is the kind of thing that can get worse if you try to quash it. Wetboys frequently disappear for weeks at a time. Sometimes they give money to their favorite rent girl in case they don’t come back. It doesn’t mean anything yet. I don’t know the girl well enough to lean on her and be completely sure what she’d do. So I’d say we have four nights.”
“Who’s next?” Gaelan asked.
“Saron and Jade Marion.”
“Two at once? Siblings?”
“Husband and wife. More than a little crazy.”
“Anyone who chooses this work is crazy,” Gaelan said.
“They have a seven-year-old son.”
“So I’m making an orphan. Fantastic.”
“They’re already teaching him the business. Crazy.”
“Oh, so now I’m doing him a favor?” Gaelan asked.
“In this life, some people are finished before they begin, Gaelan.”
“You’ll take care of him.”
Her eyebrows lifted. First you were worried for him, now you want me to kill him?
>
“I mean, provide for him,” Gaelan said. “You’re not going to put him on the street. He gets a chance. Small as it may be.”
“Done,” Gwinvere said.
* * *
They were beating the boy when Gaelan arrived, landing on a neighbor’s rooftop. He supposed that should have made it easier. The Marions’ home, bamboo and rice paper with a steep slate roof, was in a nicer arean the southeast side of the city. The home itself was small, but had a large yard, surrounded by a high fence so their neighbors couldn’t watch them train.
It was oddly careless for two wetboys, but then Gaelan supposed if you had a child, it was hard to move surreptitiously between safe houses. And any robber who accidentally came here would quickly wish he hadn’t. And if someone knew he was attacking two wetboys and decided to do it anyway, he was probably powerful enough to find you regardless.
Still. Odd.
And it was the mother doing the beating. “Faster, Hubert! Pathetic. You disgust me.” The boy was curled up on the ground, and she was punching him, her fist stabbing in past his blocks, efficient, crisp, remorseless.
Will you serve me in this?
~What are you doing, Acaelus?~
Serve me or abandon me, black heart. I’m going.
Gaelan leapt from the roof. There were good tactical reasons to do this—there were doubtless booby traps on the fence, on the wetboys’ own roof, and at their doors—but really, he just wanted to get it over with.
Problem with jumping—you can’t change course in midair. Jade screamed something just before Gaelan descended. Gaelan’s sword was out, aimed squarely for Saron’s back, going for the heart.
But Saron jumped instantly, and used his Talent to do so.
Gaelan’s sword struck deeply enough that the blade stuck and was ripped out of his hands by the force of Saron’s jump.
Gaelan hit the ground off-balance and rolled, popping to his feet and throwing a pair of knives at Jade.
She stood still, apparently stunned by his appearance.
The knives passed through her, and she popped.