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