No more blessings. No more mercy. No more salt. No more light in my dark corners. Let this end. Please.
60
F ear flashed through Kylar. He dropped into the smoke. A thunk and a metal whine resounded above him. He rolled and saw one knife sticking out of the door and one sticking through the sheet metal of the chimney.
“So you figured out that it will make you invisible, huh?” Durzo Blint said from somewhere in the darkness near the huge fan at the south end of the tunnel.
“Dammit, Blint! I told you I don’t want to fight,” Kylar said, then moved away from where he’d been standing when he spoke.
He scanned the darkness. Even if Durzo weren’t fully invisible, in the smoke and flickering interplay of light and shadow he might as well be.
“That was quite a dive, boy. You trying to become a legend yourself?” Durzo asked, but his voice oddly strangled, mournful. Kylar stumbled. Durzo was now by the smaller fan at the north end of the tunnel. He must have passed within a pace of Kylar to get there.
“Who are you?” Kylar asked. “You’re Acaelus Thorne, aren’t you?” Kylar almost forgot to move.
A knife sailed a hand’s breadth from Kylar’s stomach and pinged off the wall.
“Acaelus was a fool. He played the Devil and now I draw the Devil’s due.” Durzo’s voice was raw, husky. He’d been weeping.
“Master Blint,” Kylar said, adding the honorific for the first time since before he’d taken the ka’kari. “Why don’t you join me? Help me kill Roth. He’s outside, isn’t he?”
“Outside with a boatload of meisters and Vürdmeisters,” Durzo said. “It’s over, Kylar. Khalidor will hold the castle within an hour. More highlanders arrive at dawn, and an army of Khalidoran regulars is already marching for the city. Anyone who could have led an army against them is dead or fled.”
There was a distant gong, reverberating up the raw throat of the chimney. Warm air started blowing up from the depths.
Kylar felt sickened. His work had been for nothing. A few soldiers killed, a few nobles saved—it hadn’t changed anything.
He padded over to the small north fan, which was now turning faster. Through its blades, he could see Roth conferring with the wytches.
Durzo was right. There were dozens of wytches. Some were getting back into their boat, but at least a score were accompanying Roth, who also had a bodyguard of a dozen gigantic highlanders.
“Roth killed my best friend,” Kylar said. “I’m going to kill him. Tonight.”
“Then you’ll have to go through me.”
“I won’t fight you.”
“You’ve always wondered if you’d be able to beat me when it came down to it,” Durzo said. “I know you have. And you have your Talent and the ka’kari now. As a boy, you swore you wouldn’t let anyone beat you. Not ever again. You said you wanted to be a killer. Have I made you one or not?”
“Damn you! I won’t fight you! Who’s Acaelus?” Kylar shouted.
Durzo’s voice rose, chanting over the sound of fans and hot wind:
“The hand of the wicked shall rise against him,
But it shall not prevail.
Their blades shall be devoured
The swords of the unrighteous shall pierce him
But he shall not fall
He shall leap from the roofs of the world
and smite princes . . . ”
Blint trailed off. “I never made it,” he said quietly.
“What are you talking about? What is that? Is that a prophecy?”
“That isn’t me, just like the Guardian of Light wasn’t Jorsin. It’s you, Kylar. You are the spirit of retribution, the Night Angel. You are the vengeance I deserve.”
Vengeance stems from a love of justice and a desire to redress wrongs. But revenge is damning. Three faces has the Night Angel, the avatar of Retribution: Vengeance, Justice, Mercy.
“But I don’t have anything to avenge. I owe you my life,” Kylar said.
Durzo’s face grew somber. “Yes, this life of blood. I served that goddam ka’kari for almost seven hundred years, Kylar. I served a dead king and a people who weren’t worthy of him. I lived in the shadows and I became like the shadow-dwellers. I gave all I was for some dream of hope that I never understood in the first place. What happens when you strip away all the masks a man wears and you find not a face beneath them but nothing at all? I failed the ka’kari once. Once I failed in seven hundred years of service, and it abandoned me.