Perfect Shadow (7 page)

A light bloomed from the castle’s highest balcony. From a hundred points lightning cracked down. Every flying narokghul dropped from the sky, becoming a smoking, bleeding rain. The bleak clouds rolled back in an instant, as if shoved aside by giants’ hands, and the light swelled ever brighter. Acaelus staggered up to a group of deserters, leaning against a granite wall at the mouth of the pass, catching their breath, weaponless, bloodied, their eyes dim, the eyes of the shamed and broken. But now those eyes reflected one sharp light. Those who had slumped now stood.

Titans rushed for the castle, smashing through three-story stone houses, stone shrapnel turned into dust motes dancing in the light of a rising sun. The earth heaved upward, just once, sweeping men and krul and titans and a hundred other kinds of monsters off their feet. Even Acaelus fell. Dogs whined. It was as if the earth herself were flinging her power into this enterprise. Into Jorsin Alkestes.

And then, just as they all stood again—obliteration. Light that blinded. Light that burned. Light that boiled the bloody river. Light that purified. Light that roared.

A rushing wind filled the blindness that followed, Acaelus knew only that it felt as if his very body were afire, veins burning inside his skin. Time shattered, scattered, thrown about and blown about. He came to himself, and the first thing he saw was his own blackened skin. Smooth, burnt perfect black, like he’d been dipped in tar.

Acaelus stood, feeling curiously whole, unconscionably strong. There were pillars of ash around him, howling winds already blowing away the remnants of what had been men. Against the granite wall, etched by light, shadows stood. Ghosts of the men who’d been vaporized. One shadow was different. One shadow stood, defiant, one fist raised, edges perfect, outline crisp—Acaelus’s shadow. The others were dim, washed out. Bleached by a flood of light that had continued even after the men who had cast them were burned away. But through all the fire, one man had stood.

The black skin retreated into his body, unbidden, leaving him naked. His clothes and even his armor had been burned away.

Acaelus looked at leagues of wasteland. Nothing stirred but what was stirred by the wind. Death had taken the throne from Jorsin. A gleaming black dome huddled where once Trayethell had stood.

~Acaelus. Mourn later. There is work to be done.~

The voice came from inside his own head. The black ka’kari. It had saved him. It had been a secret gift from Jorsin Alkestes, who had told bull-headed Acaelus Thorne to flee, to live.

But Jorsin hadn’t said he meant Acaelus to live forever.

I’ll come back and take it off your hands,
Jorsin had promised with his roguish grin when he’d given Acaelus the treasure. The liar. He was wan, washed out, but his eyes burned with a fevered intensity. He’d been spending every day fighting and every night with archmage Ezra, making…something. Never sleeping. Working on some last-minute salvation that Acaelus only slowly came to understand wasn’t coming.

Jorsin Alkestes: emperor, genius, archmage, tyrant. Jorsin Alkestes was a light so bright he left shadows standing centuries hence. The semblances of men, burned onto granite walls. And one shadow was perfect above all others. A walking, breathing shadow. A shadow as flickering as the ghosts thrown by a candle, as mutable as a king’s promises. A shadow who devoured light and life.

Light is, but a shadow undefined becomes simply darkness. And light had been too long denied the man who had been Acaelus Thorne. He was thin, fraying, a bowlful of smoke. He was becoming undifferentiated darkness.

What if the light itself had been a lie?

Mount Tenji is the tallest mountain in Ceura. When I was a kid, people used to make pilgrimages up the mountain. It’s been too cold for that for centuries. It’s a volcano, but it hasn’t erupted in more than a hundred years. Some smoke from time to time is all.

I reach the crater on the sixth day of climbing. I’m buried deep in many layers of coats. The wind is blowing snow everywhere.

You’re good for a lot of things,
I think at the black ka’kari,
but keeping me warm isn’t one of them.

~You left off part of Oath of Sa’kagé the other day.~

Noticed, did you?

~“Until the king returns, I shall not lay my burden down.”~

I pause.
Jorsin Alkestes is dead. He’s not coming back.

~Gather the ka’kari. Bring them all together. It’s time.~

Impossible.

~Impossible? For you?~

And if I’m successful? I have a
fraction
of Jorsin Alkestes’ power, and I’m unstoppable. He was my king, but I’m not sure he wasn’t mad at the end.

The ka’kari doesn’t answer. It knows me well enough to know when I have to muddle through things on my own.

There is only one question: Does what you do, every day, have meaning? Acaelus had thought his actions did, once. For centuries, he’d put his faith in Jorsin Alkestes. A long dead king. A madman who’d sworn he would return. Even from death. A madman who’d left madness everywhere in his wake.

Acaelus had given his all. He was tired of giving. He was tired of believing. It was too much. It was finished.

~He loved you, you know. More than anyone. Do you trust your old friend?~

I stand on that windblown peak for some time.

“Not to be a god.”

I toss the red ka’kari into the crater.

I strap the
schlusses
to my feet, and head down the mountain at great speed. Ordinarily, the speed and danger give me a fierce joy. But now I’m a husk. I’m like the great sequoys of Torra’s Bend, leaves still green but the heart rotted out, hollow, waiting, just waiting for the storm to come along that will end it all. A mummery of life. More alone than I’ve ever been.

The volcano won’t destroy the red, I don’t think. But it does put it beyond reach. Either the red will get caught partway down, but not all the way in the magma, and it will be impossible for anyone to live long muddle grab it, or it will make it all the way down, soak up as much power as it can hold—a huge amount—and then release it. Over and over.

I’m halfway down the mountain when the volcano explodes.

Guess it made it to the magma.

I turn my back on the volcano as I’ve turned my back on my king. Fire pursues me, but emptiness can’t be threatened. Emptiness holds nothing dear. Emptiness knows no fear.

The Nameless is working on his new face in Gwinvere’s mirror. It’s important that he do this here, so she can see it and have no doubts that the new him is really him still. But body magic hurts like a motherfucker, and he doesn’t want to show her the pain. He drinks more. He’s drunk, and it takes heroic amounts of alcohol to get him drunk. The black ka’kari negates poisons, for the most part—a fact Yvor Vas probably would have liked to know.

“You’re not as pretty as Gaelan was,” she says, finally, looking at his blond hair, thin blond beard, and pockmarked cheeks. She isn’t pleased with his drunkenness, but at least she doesn’t seem afraid of his abilities.

“This was my first face. My real face, you could say, if such a thing had any meaning for me.” Acaelus Thorne’s face. A whimsical choice, perhaps a dangerous choice, but a shadow should bear some resemblance to the shape that cast it.

“Handsome, before the scars. A bit grim, with them,” she says.

He grunts. What looks like pockmarks actually came from the acid blood spray of a monster in the last battle, where Jorsin Alkestes died, when Trayethell fell. The mages at the time hadn’t been able to heal them. Now, he doesn’t want to erase that last memento of the man who might have been his friend.

From downstairs, he can hear little kids shouting, playing. Street kids, guild rats, the slave-born who have no place to go. Gwinvere takes them in sometimes. They call her Momma K. Right now, the wretches are bickering—not exactly what you hope for when you’re showing kindness, but often all you get when you show kindness to those who can’t return it.

Gwinvere says, “The captain of the city guard has reported you dead, without reporting your name. Anyone who digs will figure out that Gaelan Starfire was killed in a fire in the Warrens. There will be some rumors that Gaelan ran afoul of the previous Shinga. Since deceased. A literal dead end.”

“Very satisfying,” the nameless emptiness says.

“So what’s your new name?” Gwinvere asks.

“Durzo,” he says into his flagon as he raises it for another drink. “Durzo Flint.” He’d often carried surnames that meant something, and it seems to be a tradition among some of the wetboys as well. Flint: sharp, dangerous, brittle. Fair enough.

“Durzo Blint?” she asks, misunderstanding him.

From Flint to Blint. A portmanteau of
flint
and
blunt
, perhaps. The sharp and the blunt. A paradox smashed together. Or just smashed. A descent from meaning to meaninglessness. It seems appropriate. He suddenly remembers Polus Merit’s prophecy. Polus had said Blint, too, hadn’t he? “That’s right,” he says. “Durzo Blint.” He drinks.
Here’s to you, Polus Merit. You fat pain in the ass.

“Well,
Durzo
, I’ve got a job for you,” Gwinvere says. “Someone who needs killing.”

Gwinvere Kirena is strength incarnate. Perfection in flesh. Utterly flawless, and somehow thereby utterly sterile, impervious. When he looks at Gwinvere, he doesn’t see a woman who will ever be caught off her guard. She will never be hanged, or strangled, or have her throat cut, or have her brains beaten out. She’s too strong for that, too smart.

Gwinvere doesn’t need him, so he can’t fail her. She is the cold safety of a lean-to in the rain, not the false comfort of a stone castle that will fall on your head and destroy you utterly. She extends a scrap of paper.

Gwinvere likes kids. An odd juxtaposition. A scrap of humanity.

This is what I get. This is what I deserve. Scraps.

He doesn’t look at the paper. He doesn’t take his eyes off of hers, mirroring him. He doesn’t care whose name is on the note. He doesn’t care what they’ve done. “I’ll take it,” he says.

Brent Weeks was born and raised in Montana. After getting his paper keys from Hillsdale College, Brent started writing on bar napkins, then on lesson plans, then full time. Eventually, someone paid him for it. Brent lives in Oregon with his wife, Kristi. He doesn’t own cats or wear a ponytail.

 

Author Brent Weeks. Photo © Travis Johnson Photography.