Night Angel Complete Trilogy Part 24

"You were right," Feir said. "He doesn't believe you."

Aside from carelessness, the only things that could kill wetboys were other wetboys, mages, and wytches. In Blint's estimation, wytches were the worst. He hadn't neglected Kylar's education. "Let me see your arms," Kylar said.

"Ah, so you know about the vir," Dorian said. "How much do you know about them?" Dorian bared his arms to the elbows. There were no marks on them.

"I know that all wytches have them, that they grow in proportion to the wytch's power and their intricacy shows the wytch's level of mastery," Kylar said.

"Don't do it, Dorian," Feir said. "I'm not going to lose you over this. Let's tell him the words and get the h.e.l.l out of here."

Dorian ignored him. "Only men and women who are Talented can use the vir. It's easier to manipulate than the Talent and more powerful. It's also terribly addictive and, if one dare speak in moral absolutes-which I do-it's evil," Dorian said, his eyes bright, holding Kylar. "Unlike the Talent, which can be good or bad like any talent, it is in itself evil, and it corrupts those who use it. It has proven useful to my family to have all meisters marked, so they are. My ancestors never saw any reasons to be marked ourselves unless we so chose. The Ursuuls can make their vir disappear at will, so long as they aren't using it."

"Blint must have skipped that lesson," Kylar said.

"A pity it is, too. We're the most dangerous Vurdmeisters you could possibly imagine."

"Dorian, just tell him the words. Let's-"

"Feir!" Dorian said. "Silence. You know what to do."

The big man obeyed, glowering at Kylar.

"Kylar," Dorian said. "You're asking a drunkard who's quit drinking to take just one gla.s.s of wine. I'll live in misery for weeks for this. Feir will have to watch me constantly to see that I don't slip away to that madness. But you're worth it."

Feir's mouth tightened, but he didn't say a word.

Dorian held his arms out and a s.h.i.+mmer pa.s.sed over them. As Kylar stared at them, it looked as if veins deep in the man's arms were wriggling, struggling to get to the surface of his skin. Then, rapidly, they rose all together. Dorian's arms turned black like a million fresh tattoos were being inked over each other. Layer knotted on layer, each distinct, interlocking with those below and above, darker over lighter with darker still coming in above. It was beautiful and terrible. The vir swelled with power and moved, not just with Dorian's arms, but independently. It seemed that they wanted to burst free of the confines of his skin. The darkness of the vir spread to the room, and Kylar was sure it wasn't his imagination: the vir were sucking the light from the room.

Dorian's eyes dilated until the cool blue irises were tiny rims. A fierce joy rose in his face and he looked ten years younger. The vir started to swell, crackling audibly.

Feir picked up Dorian like most men might pick up a doll and shook him violently. He shook and didn't stop shaking. It would have been comical if Kylar weren't too scared to move. Feir just shook and shook until the room was no longer dark with power. Then he set Dorian down in a chair.

The man groaned and abruptly looked frail and older once more. He spoke without raising his head. "I'm glad you're convinced, Shadowstrider."

It had convinced him, but Dorian couldn't know that. "How do I know it wasn't an illusion?" Kylar asked.

"Illusions don't suck light. Illusions-" Feir said.

"He's just being stubborn, Feir. He believes." Dorian glanced at Kylar and quickly looked away. He groaned. "Ah, I can't even look at you now. All your futures...." He squeezed his eyes shut.

"What do you want from me?" Kylar asked.

"I can see the future, Nameless One, but I am only human, so I pray that I can be wrong. I pray that I am wrong. By everything I've seen, if you don't kill Durzo Blint tomorrow, Khalidor will take Cenaria. If you don't kill him by the day after that, everyone you love will die. Your Sa'kage count, the s.h.i.+nga, your friends old and new, all of them. If you do the right thing once, it will cost you a year of guilt. If you do the right thing twice, it will cost you your life."

"So that's what this is? All this is just a setup so I'll betray Master Blint? Did your masters think I would buy it?" Kylar said. "Oh, you learned a lot about me, must have cost a fortune to buy all that information."

Dorian held up a weary hand. "I don't ask you to believe it all now. It's too much all at once. I'm sorry for that. You think now that we're Khalidorans and we want you to betray Blint so that he can't stop us. Maybe this will convince you that you're wrong: What I beg of you above all else is that you kill my brother. Don't let him get the ka'kari." will convince you that you're wrong: What I beg of you above all else is that you kill my brother. Don't let him get the ka'kari."

Kylar felt as if he'd just been stung. "The what?"

"Feir," Dorian said. "Say the words we came to say."

"Ask Momma K," Feir said.

He shook his head. "Wait! What? Ask her about the ka'kari?"

"Ask Momma K," Feir said.

"What about your brother, who is he?"

"If I tell you now, you'll lose when you fight him." Dorian shook his head, but still didn't look at Kylar. "d.a.m.n this power. What good is it if I can't tell you in a way you'll understand? Kylar, if time is a river, most people live submerged. Some rise to the surface and can guess what's going to happen next, or can understand the past. I'm different. When I don't concentrate, I detach from the flow of time. My consciousness floats above the river. I see a thousand thousand paths. Ask me where a leaf will fall, and I couldn't tell you. There are too many possibilities. There's so much noise, like I'm trying to follow a drop of rain from the clouds to a lake, then over a waterfall and pick it out in the river two leagues downstream. If I can touch someone or chant rhymes, it gives me focus. Sometimes." Dorian seemed to be looking through the wall, lost in reverie.

"Sometimes," he said, "sometimes when I transcend the river, I start to see a pattern. Then it isn't like water, it's a fabric made up of every insignificant decision of every peasant as much as it is of great decisions by kings. As I begin to comprehend the vastness and intricacy of that skein, my mind starts to pull apart." He blinked, and he turned his eyes to Kylar. He squinted, as if even looking at him caused him pain.

"Sometimes it's merely images, totally unbidden. I can see the anguish on the young man's face who will watch me die, but I don't know who he is or when that will be or why he'll care. I know that tomorrow, a square vase will give you hope. I see a little girl crying over your body. She's trying to pull you away but you're too heavy. Away from what? I don't know."

Kylar felt a chill. "A girl? When?" Was it Ilena Drake?

"I can't tell. Wait." Dorian blinked and his face went rigid. "Go, go now. Ask Momma K!"

Feir threw open the front door. Kylar stared from one mage to the other, stunned at the abruptness of his dismissal.

"Go," Feir said. "Go!"

Kylar ran into the night.

For a long moment, Feir stared after him. He spat. Still staring into the depths of the night, he said, "What didn't you tell him?"

Dorian let out a shaky breath. "He's going to die. No matter what."

"How does that fit?"

"I don't know. Maybe he's not what we hoped."

35

Kylar ran, but Doubt ran faster. The sky was lightening in the east, and the city was showing its first signs of life. The odds of running into a patrol were small, especially because Kylar knew better than to run on the roads past the rich shops that somehow saw patrols more frequently than roads with poor shops, but if he did run into guards, what would he say? I was just out for a morning walk with dark gray clothes, illegal plants, a small a.r.s.enal, and my face smudged with ash. Right.

He slowed to a walk. Momma K's wasn't far now, anyway. What was he doing? Obeying a madman and a giant? He could almost see the vir rising from Dorian's arms, and it turned his stomach. Maybe not a madman. But what was their piece? The only people Kylar knew who did things just because they should were the Drakes, and he figured that they were the exception to the rule. In the Sa'kage, in the court, in the real world, people did what was best for themselves.

Feir and Dorian hadn't denied that they had other motives for coming to Cenaria, but they certainly acted like he was the most important thing. They'd acted like they really believed he would change the course of the kingdom! It was madness. But he had believed them.

If they were just liars, wouldn't they try to tell him how great things would be if he killed Blint? Or were they just that much cleverer than most liars? It seemed that by what Dorian had said that Kylar was going to lose everything no matter what he did. What kind of fortune-teller told you that?

Still, Kylar found himself jogging again, and then running, startling a laundress filling her buckets with water. He stopped at Momma K's door and suddenly felt uneasy again. Momma K stayed up late and woke early every day, but if there was one time of the day that he could be sure she'd be in bed, it was right now. It was the only time of day that the door would be locked. Dammit, would you just make a decision? Dammit, would you just make a decision?

Kylar rapped on the door quietly, berating himself for being a coward, yet deciding all the same that he would leave if no one answered it.

The door opened almost immediately. Momma K's maid looked almost as surprised as Kylar was. She was an old woman, wearing a s.h.i.+ft, with a shawl around her shoulders. "Well, good morning, my lord. If you aren't a sight. I couldn't sleep, I just kept on thinking that we'd run out of flour for some reason, though I checked it just last night, for some reason I couldn't get it out of my mind that it was all gone. I was just walking past the door to check it when you knocked-oh by the twelve nipples of Arixula, I'm chattering like a daft old ninny."

Kylar opened his mouth, but a word wouldn't fit in the cracks of the ex-prost.i.tute's rambling, edgewise or any other way.

" 'Time for a swift blow to the head, and a heave into the river, mistress,' I tell her, and she just laughs at me. I do wish I were young, if only so I could see the look on your face like I used to get. Once these old sacks would make men stand up and take notice. You'd walk right into a wall because you couldn't take your eyes off. It used to be that the sight of me in my night clothes-of course, I didn't wear old lady's rags like this, neither, but if I wore the kind of stuff I used to, I'm afraid I'd scare the children. It does make me miss the-"

"Is Momma K awake?"

"What? Oh, actually, I think so. She hasn't been sleeping well, poor girl. Maybe a visit will do her good. Though I think it was a visit from that Durzo that's got her knickers in such a bunch. It's hard at her age, going from what she's been to being like me. Almost fifty years old she is. It reminds me-"

Kylar edged past her and walked up the stairs. He wasn't even sure the old woman noticed.

He knocked and waited. No response. A sliver of light peeked through the crack along the sill, though, so he opened the door.

Momma K sat with her back to him. Two candles burned almost to nubs provided the only illumination in the room. She barely stirred when Kylar came in. Finally, she turned slowly toward him. Her eyes were swollen and red as if she'd been up all night crying. Crying? Momma K? Crying? Momma K?

"Momma K? Momma K, you look like h.e.l.l."

"You always did know just the thing to say to the ladies."

Kylar stepped into the room and closed the door. It was then he noticed the mirrors. Momma K's bedside mirror where she put on makeup, her hand mirror, even her full-length mirror, every one of them was smashed. Shards twinkled feebly from the floor in the candlelight.

"Momma K? What's going on here?"

"Don't call me that. Don't ever call me that again."

"What's going on?"

"Lies, Kylar," she said, looking down at her lap, her face half concealed in the shadows. "Beautiful lies. Lies I've worn so long I don't remember what's beneath them."

She turned. In a line down the middle of her face, she'd wiped off all her makeup. The left half of her face was free of cosmetics for the first time Kylar had ever seen. It made her look old and haggard. Fine wrinkles danced across the once delicate-now merely small and hard-planes of Gwinvere Kirena's face. Dark circles under her eyes gave her a ghostly vulnerability. The effect of half of her face being perfectly presented and the other stripped was ludicrous, ugly, almost comic.

Kylar covered his shock too slowly, not that he could ever hide much from her, but Momma K seemed satisfied to be wounded.

"I'll a.s.sume you're not here just to stare at the sideshow freak, so what do you want, Kylar?"

"You're not a sideshow-"

"Answer the question. I know what a man with a mission looks like. You're here for my help. What do you need?"

"Momma K, dammit, quit-"

"No, d.a.m.n you!" Momma K's voice cracked like a whip. Then her mismatched eyes softened and looked beyond Kylar. "It's too late. I chose this. d.a.m.n him, but he was right. I chose this life, Kylar. I've chosen every step. It's no good switching wh.o.r.es in the middle of a tumble. You're here about Durzo, aren't you."

Kylar knuckled his forehead, put off track. He could read the look in her face, though. It said, "Discussion over." Kylar surrendered. Was he here about Durzo? Well, it was as good of a place to start as any.

"He said he's going to kill me if I don't find the silver ka'kari. I don't really even know what it is."

She took a deep breath. "I've been trying to get him to tell you for years," she said. "Six ka'kari were made for Jorsin Alkestes' six champions. The people who used the ka'kari weren't mages, but the ka'kari gave them magelike powers. Not like the feeble mages of today, either, the mages of seven centuries ago. You are what they were. You're a ka'karifer. You were born with a hole in your Talent that only a ka'kari can bridge."

Momma K and Durzo had known all of this, and they hadn't thought to tell him? "Oh, well, thanks. Can you direct me to the nearest magical artifact store? Perhaps one with a discount for wetboys?" Kylar asked. "Even if there were such things, they've either been collected by the mages or they're at the bottom of the ocean or something."

"Or something."

"Are you saying you know where the silver is?"

"Consider this," Momma K said. "You're a king. You manage to get a ka'kari, but you can't use it. Maybe you don't have anyone you trust who can. What do you do? You keep it for a rainy day, or for your heirs. Maybe you never write down what it is because you know that people will go through your things when you die and steal your most valuable possession, so you plan to tell your son someday before he takes the throne. In some way or another, though, as kings so often do, you get yourself killed before you can have that talk. What happens to the ka'kari?"

"The son gets it."

"Right, and doesn't know what it is. Maybe even knows it's important, that it's magical, but like you said, if he ever tells the mages, they'll take it from him or from his heirs sooner or later. So he keeps it, and he keeps it secret. After enough generations pa.s.s, it becomes just another jewel in the royal treasury. By the time seven hundred years go by, it's switched hands dozens of times, but no one has a clue what it is. Until one day, Khalidor's G.o.d-king demands a tribute that includes one particular jewel, and a remarkably stupid king gives the very same jewel to his mistress."

"You mean-" Kylar said.

"I just found out today that Niner gave Lady Jadwin the silver ka'kari, the Globe of Edges. It looks like a small, oddly metallic jewel, like a diamond with a silver tint to it. It also happens to be one of Queen Nalia's favorite jewels. She thinks it's lost, and she's furious, so tomorrow night, someone the king trusts-I don't know who-will be sent to get it back. The Jadwins are having a party that night. So tomorrow, the ka'kari will be exposed. No royal guards, no mages, no magically warded treasury. Lady Jadwin will either be carrying it or it will be in her room. Kylar, you need to understand what's at stake. The ka'kari supposedly choose their own masters, but the Khalidorans believe they can magically force a bond. If the G.o.dking succeeds... imagine the havoc a G.o.dking would wreak if he could live forever."

It made p.r.i.c.kles go up the back of Kylar's scalp. "You really mean this, don't you? Have you told Durzo?"

"Durzo and I... I'm not too inclined to help Durzo just now. But there's more, Kylar. I'm not the only one who knows this." Anguish twisted her features and she looked away.

"What do you mean?"

"Khalidor has hired someone to get it. That's how my spies found out in the first place. Supposedly the job is a smash-and-dash."

"Supposedly?"

"They've hired Hu Gibbet."

"n.o.body would hire Hu for a smash-and-dash. The man's a butcher."

"I know," Momma K said.

"Then who's his deader?"

"Take your pick. Half the n.o.bles in the realm will be there. Your friend Logan has accepted his invitation, perhaps even the prince will be there. Those two do seem to be inseparable; for all that they are night and day to each other."

"Momma, who's your spy? Can you get me an invitation?"

She smiled mysteriously. "My spy can't help you, but I know someone who can. In fact, despite my best efforts, you know her too."