Perfect Shadow (4 page)

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
.

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.