Perfect Shadow

  Mirage! Of course. Jade was a master of illusions.

  A door slammed. The back door of the house. Jade had already escaped.

  The boy had risen. He was staring at Gaelan wide-eyed.

  “Sorry, kid,” Gaelan said. “Nothing to do with you.” He jumped over the fence into the neighbor’s much smaller yard—approximately where he thought Saron should have landed.

  Saron was in the yard, standing on trembling legs, leaning against a sapling for support. Gaelan’s sword had entered his back and exited below his belly button. The force of his jump had yanked it downward, but it hadn’t cut all the way through his pelvis—so the blade was sticking out of his crotch, angled down. Blood dripped off the sword’s point like piss dribbling off a penis.

  “You won’t get it,” Saron said.

  “Get what?” Gaelan asked, playing along.

  “The red stone. The fire ruby.”

  The red ka’kari? What the hell? “You’re dying,” Gaelan said. “If you don’t make your move soon, you won’t have the strength.”

  Saron shifted, and a gush of blood and worse splurted onto the ground fr his groin. A knife tumbled out of his nerveless fingers. He grunted, face contorted in pain. “Too late. Curse you.”

  “How much does she love you?” Gaelan asked quietly.

  “What?” Saron’s eyes suddenly showed a bit of real fear.

  Gaelan lowered his voice further. “Because I want to know if I’m going to have to chase Jade down, or if she’ll come back if I stand here talking to you long enough.”

  ~You’re despicable, Gaelan.~

  Spare me.

  “I’ll kill you!” Saron shouted.

  Raising his voice. Doubtless to cover the approach of—

  Gaelan threw himself to the side.

  A spear pierced the air where he’d stood a second before. A mistake. She should have attacked with projectiles. She thrust again immediately as he moved in. The blade cut his tunic as it passed between his torso and his arm.

  Gaelan locked his elbow around the spear’s shaft, trapping it as he twisted, bringing up his other hand and snapping the shaft below the spearhead before Jade could snatch it back.

  Give her this. She’d been overcome by emotion for a moment—wanting to kill him immediately so she could tend to her dying husband—but she was cool now. She instantly lashed out again with the broken weapon, using it as a staff, unfazed.

  Unarmed, Gaelan dodged behind the sapling where Saron was leaning, dying. Her strike rattled the whole tree, making Saron groan.

  She stabbed at Gaelan, right past Saron. Once, twice. Gaelan dodged, dodged, then blocked, absorbing the blow and throwing her back. He ripped his sword free of Saron’s back.

  Jade was blonde, with appropriately green eyes, hard and skinny. A muscular beauty.

  She began spinning the staff in great, fast circles, while she circled Gaelan widdershins. Saron was groaning again. He’d fallen to the ground, propped awkwardly against the little sapling.

  Jade made no move to attack, her face a mask of intensity, stance low, staff whirling.

  Gaelan would have been fooled if his eyes weren’t so good, ka’kari aided. But there was a slight shimmer to Jade’s figure. And that spinning staff made no noise as it cut the air.

  Dropping low, Gaelan spun, attacking behind himself, his sword cutting a gleaming arc—batting aside a shadowy sword as the real Jade, shadow-cloaked, attacked from behind him.

  Gaelan’s lightning-fast riposte cut halfway through her neck. Jade dropped instantly. His blade had cut her spine. Arterial blood jetted over his face as his sword slid out of her neck. The shadows she’d wrapped around her body retreated. Disappeared.

  The illusion of her—her distraction, her doppelganger—continued circling, whirling the phantasmal staff. Jade had split it off from herself when Gaelan had turned away to grab his sword. Then she’d wrapped herself in shadows, and had circled him the opposite way. Clever.

  The illusory Jade circled all the way to Gaelan, intent ong r staff.

  At Gaelan’s touch, the illusion fell apart.

  When Gaelan turned again, Jade was dead. Her illusions had outlived her.

  Not so different, are we?

  The Marions’ little boy, Hubert, came running into the yard with a little, child-sized crossbow in his hands, crying. “Father! Faather!”

  Not ten paces away, wrapped in shadows, gathered in the arms of the night, Gaelan watched. With one hand, he rubbed his temples.

  “Mother! Mother!” The boy, the orphan, ran to her corpse.

  Darkness.

  * * *

  Gwinvere guided Gaelan to the basin, washed the blood off his hands. He knew he should snap out of it, but he was wooden, leaden, numb. Dead.

  Jade, blond hair stained into a black halo around her head, neck cut at a sharp upward angle from collarbone to chin.

  Jerissa, petite Cenarian with brown eyes, expression blank, never again to show her quirky grin, dress matted with blood from a single sword stroke through her heart.

  Ysel, round Ymmuri face angelic, chest crushed, every rib snapped.

  Lithel, kinky Ladeshian hair pulled into many small braids, eyes open, blackballed from the blow that had crushed the back of her skull.

  Hannan, still a beauty at seventy, hair like ivory, smile lines by the dozen. The bruise prints of strangling hands around her neck.

  Direla, her dusky Sethi skin fine, nose patrician, hair almost blue-black. The violence that had killed her hadn’t left any marks—at least not on her face.

  Fayima, features so demolished he wouldn’t have been able to recognize the young princess if not for the little mole on the side of her neck.

  Platinum-blond Ahnuwk. Aelin, the fire dancer. Kir, exiled duchess turned pirate.

  And on it went. A line of women, young and old. His wives and lovers from over the centuries. All dead. All dead because of him. One way or the other.

  He turned and saw a line of dead children. His children. His dead. His fault.

  Gwinvere pulled his tunic over his head like he was a child. He was standing beside a steaming tub of water. He hadn’t even noticed it being brought in.

  * * *

  “You’ve come a long way, Tal Drakkan—or is it Gaelan Starfire now? So hard to run from the past, isn’t it?” The man sat astride his fine midnight warhorse. A self-satisfied smirker. He was the kind of man you knew was headed for a fall, but not for a while.

  Gaelan sneered. Said nothing. Continued walking home.

  “You’re a duke, not a dirt farmer. This is beneath you. You’re a warrior! I want you to fight for me, Gaelan Starfire,” Baron Rikku said, “and I won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Oh yes you will.”

  * * *

  Gaelan was working in the field, repairing his fence after the heaving and shifting of the ground in the winter, stacking the big, flat rocks back into their places while his big, shaggy aurochs looked at him quizzically.

  “Sure,” he told the big one he called Oren. “Pretend you won’t try to jump this soon as I turn my back.”

  Gaelan found one of the boulders that had slipped and rolled from its place. He looked left and right to see if any of the neighboring farmers were within sight. They already wondered how he was able to do so much of the heavy work by himself.

  No one.

  He grabbed the boulder and, with his Talent surging, picked it up and set it back in place.

  “Not bad? Huh?” he said, slapping his hands free of dirt and mud.

  Oren didn’t seem impressed.

  Gaelan liked being a farmer. Enough physical labor to keep him fit without the use of body magic. The imposition of order on the chaos of nature. The straight lines of plowing. The simplicity of his neighbors, who didn’t ask anything of him except a helping hand once in a while for a barn raising.

  He fixed a full league of fence before darkfall. And walked home, dirty, sweaty, and happy.

  When he got home,
on the big oak out front, he found his daughter and his pregnant wife. Hanged.

  He dropped to his knees. Screamed.

  * * *

  “Seraene. Alinaea.” The names came out as sobs.

  “Shh. Shh.”

  Gwinvere held him in her bed, her arms around him, protective. She stroked his hair over his temples.

  When he woke in the morning, Gwinvere was already up. She looked at him with what he swore was real desire in her eyes. “Take me,” she said. “You’ll feel like yourself again afterward.”

  Truth was, he already felt better. He’d slept the memories off like a bad batch of mushrooms. But only a fool would turn down a woman as beautiful as Gwinvere Kirena. He pulled her into his arms.

  * * *

  “There’s only one kill left,” Gwinvere said. She was in her dressing gown, her cheeks still flushed from their lovemaking, but she was abruptly all business.

  Gaelan sat up in bed. “Who?”

  “Scarred Wrable, Gaelan. He’s the only one who knows who you are. He’s the only one who can guess what I’m doing. And he’s been ordered to report to the Shinga. Tonight. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but it’s the only way.”

  * * *

  “Arutayro?” a voice asked next to Gaelan’s table. It was an old wetboy tradition—an oath of nonaggression for one hour. The inn was dark, smoky with tobacco and riotweed. The kind of place where no one asked questions of strangers.

  ,” Gaelan affirmed. On the table, wrapped in a sash, were all of his weapons.

  Ben Wrable set his sash full of weapons on the table next to Gaelan’s. He sat. “I didn’t expect you to know arutayro, Gaelan. That’s old. Real old.”

  “So am I.”

  “I doubt that. I bet I’m older than you are,” Ben said.

  “Hmm. How long we got?”

  “I’m to report in three hours. So if you’re going to try to kill me, you’ll need to—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Go on, Gaelan. Give me the dignity of honesty. I know Gwinvere. I don’t take it personal. Her back’s to the wall. If you let me go, the other wetboys will…” He trailed off. His eyebrows climbed. “You already got the others?”

  Gaelan nodded.

  Ben cursed. “Even Jade and Saron?”

  “They were tough.”

  Ben whistled. Thinking he was being summoned, a serving man came over. “Uh, two ales,” Ben said. The man left. “If you don’t kill me, Gaelan, the Shinga will order me to kill you. You’ll only push your problems back a day or two. And he’ll send the bashers and all the apprentice wetboys after you.”

  “I lied to you about that symbol you cut into your chest,” Gaelan said. “I have seen it before. It’s a pictogram. Literally, it means split-head. Moron. Idiot.”

  Ben’s face darkened, fingers twitched toward his sash. Then he laughed ruefully. “I could tell you were lying the other day when you said you’d never seen it before. By the Night Angels’ balls. Moron. And I prove it by cutting the fucking thing into my chest over and over for fifteen years. No wonder the Friaki villagers wouldn’t say what it meant. And you, you’re an asshole for telling me.”

  Gaelan nodded, acknowledging the truth of it. Took a drink. “Then I found this,” Gaelan said.

  He put a pendant on the table. It was two horseshoe nails, one bent into a circle, the other piercing it most of the way. Ben’s lost pendant, the very one that had been taken from him when he was put into the Death Games.

  A quick sneer, like You expect me to believe this? I told you what it looked like! was replaced by puzzlement. Ben flipped the pendant over, looking at the scores and scratches in the iron, matching them with memories over a decade old. He looked up sharply. His voice was stricken, awed. “How did you possibly find—”

  Gaelan lifted the pendant from Ben’s limp hand. Suspended from the chain, the weight of nail flipped the symbol upside down: instead of being split from the top down, the circle was split from the bottom up. Gaelan said, “You were a kid. You copied the symbol wrong, Ben. This symbol means split-heart: The one who’s claimed half of my heart. It means beloved, favorite. It’s the kind of thing a gorathi war chief would give only to his firstborn son.”

  He gave the pendant to the wide-eyed wetboy.

  Ben put the pendant on. He threw back his ale, cursed quietly. Then he held the pendant in his palm—holding it like that, picking it up fom how it naturally hung, it was inverted. That was how he would have seen it last when he was a boy, when it had been taken from him. That was how he’d gotten it wrong. He chuckled, delighted. “You are something else, Gaelan.”

  ~I’m still surprised you didn’t put contact poison on the pendant. Every time I want to give up on you, Acaelus, you do something like this.~

  “I memorized that book you gave me,” Gaelan said.

  “What book? The poisons book? How’d you memorize the whole—how’d you even read the— Oh shit.” Ben looked at his empty flagon. “You motherfucker. You took an oath! Arutayro—”

  “Doesn’t apply. The poison I used isn’t lethal. It’ll just knock you out for a while. In a way, I’m upholding arutayro, because now I don’t have to kill you.”

  Ben weaved in his seat. “How? How’d you do it?”

  “Paid someone in the kitchen to dose both. The way I mixed it, the poison’s heavier than the ale, so it mixes only in the bottom of the flagon.”

  “But if I hadn’t finished my ale…”

  “You always finish your ale, Ben.”

  Ben blinked, slowly, holding himself up with his elbows. “But if you don’t kill me…”

  Gaelan left a pile of coins on the table and nodded to the serving man. “I’ll have to kill the Shinga. I know.”

  Ben’s head slumped to the table.

  * * *

  Shirtless, Gaelan Starfire was arming.

  On the opposite side of the room, Gwinvere Kirena was dressing.

  He held up a light gray tunic mottled with black to his chest. Looked at it in the mirror. Rejected it for a black tunic mottled with gray.

  She held up a fiery red dress to her chest. Looked at it in the mirror. Rejected it for a sapphire blue that was lower cut.

  He strapped a pair of throwing knives to one muscular thigh.

  She pulled a silk stocking up one shapely thigh.

  He pulled a weapons harness around his shoulders, knotted it tight.

  She took a deep breath as a servant cinched her corset.

  He clipped his mask around his neck.

  She clipped a jeweled necklace around hers.

  He slid a knife into a wrist sheath.

  She spritzed perfume on her wrist.

  He looked at her in his mirror and found her looking at him in hers. He was an Angel of Death. She was a goddess.

  He bowed to the mirror. “Good luck tonight, my lady.”

  She curtsied, face grave. “Good luck, Master Starfire.” She didn’t say my lord. But then, she wouldn’t.

  He jumped out the window.

  * * *

  Gaelan jumped across a narrow alley, landed on the peak of a crumbling inn’s roof, ran across the narrow beam like an acrobat, jumped and fell six paces onto a lower, flat roof.

  “I am Sa’kagé, a lord of the shadows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not.”

  The clouds broke over the city. A giant crack of thunder. Downpour.

  “I am the strong arm of deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He-Who-Guards-Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless.”

  He jumped into one of the few standing sections of an ancient aqueduct. Quick footsteps in the rain puddling in that venerable stone waterway. Leapt.

  Below, a rich carriage pulled by four horses was rattling through the streets.

  “The befouled shall not go unpunished.”

  Landed on a mouldering thatch roof, had to scramble on all fours to keep from slipping off as the stuff tore apart.

  “My way is hard, but I
serve unbroken. In ignobility, nobility. In shame, honor. In darkness, light. I will do justice and love mercy.”

  The man in the carriage was one of the Nine, the Cenarian Sa’kagé’s master of coin, Count Rimbold Drake. Brilliant young man, perceptive but not ambitious. He’d stumbled into his position on the Nine by his sheer competence. Gwinvere didn’t believe he cared who was the Shinga. So this was mercy.

  Gaelan jumped across the street directly above the carriage. He flipped and whipped a knife downward at incredible speed.

  The blade punched through the carriage’s roof. It quivered in the carriage seat between Count Drake’s legs.

  Count Drake gaped at the hole in the carriage roof, dribbling rain. The dagger was an inch from his groin. There was a note tied around the dagger’s handle.

  The count took the note. The words were written in a tight, angular hand: “Not A Miss.”

  * * *

  Gaelan watched the men guarding one entrance to the Chamber of Nine. There were at least six entrances he knew, but this one was the most direct. Three of the men were simple bashers—just muscle to stop passersby from entering the wrong alley. Men good in a brawl.

  Will you serve me in this?

  Gaelan pulled the shadows around himself and crawled, clinging to a thatch roof, keeping a low profile.

  ~She’s not a good woman. You must know that.~

  Three archers squinted against the downpour, doing their best to protect their bowstrings under their cloaks.

  No, but she’s the least bad.

  Two spotters stood on balconies, one studying the street, the other looking over the roofs.

  ~Giving power to the bad to fight the evil. A devil’s argument.~

  Gaelan reached the edge of the building. Two more bashers were rit underneath him. I am a devil.

  ~It was to you Jorsin Alkestes administered the Oath of Sa’kagé, Acaelus. You could lead the Sa’kagé yourself.~

  Leadership is best left to the idealistic and the arrogant.

  It would be best if he could get in without killing anyone, but he couldn’t do that alone. Not without the ka’kari’s help.

  ~Very well, Acaelus. I shall serve.~