Brent Weeks - Shadow's Edge

“That’s about to change,” Jarl said.

“Will you take anyone?” Momma K said.

“You’re just trying to spite me, aren’t you?” Brant asked.

“No,” Jarl said, ignoring him and answering Momma K. “It’ll be less conspicuous to smuggle one out.” Jarl turned to Brant, “Brant, I have a task for you while I’m gone.”

“You’re talking about Kylar Stern, aren’t you?”

Jarl smiled. “Yes. Are you an honest man, General?”

The general sighed. “Everywhere except on the battlefield.”

Jarl clapped him on the shoulder. “Then I want you to figure out how Logan Gyre’s army is going to destroy the Godking’s.”

“Logan doesn’t have an army,” Brant said.

“That’s Momma K’s problem,” Jarl said.

“Pardon me?” she asked.

“Terah Graesin does. I want you to figure out how it’s going to become Logan’s.”

“What?” Momma K asked.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Jarl said, “I’ve got a date in Caernarvon.”

D id I die and not notice?” Kylar asked. He was moving through the death fog again, the familiar moving-without-moving feeling against his skin. A cloaked figure stood beyond the edge of the fog, as ethereal as the fog itself, and Kylar was sure it was the Wolf, but he hadn’t died. Had he? Had someone killed him in his sleep? He’d just lain down—

“What is this? A dream?” Kylar asked.

The cloaked man turned, and Kylar’s tension melted. It wasn’t the Wolf. It was Dorian Ursuul.

“A dream?” Dorian asked. He squinted at Kylar through the fog. “I suppose so, if a peculiar variety thereof.” He smiled. He was a handsome man, if intense. His black hair was disheveled, his blue eyes intelligent, his features balanced. “Why is it, my shadow-striding friend, that we don’t fear dreams? We lose consciousness, lose control, things happen with no apparent logic and abiding by no apparent rules. Friends appear and morph into strangers. Environments shift abruptly, and we rarely question it. We don’t fear dreams, but we do fear madness, and death terrifies us.”

“What the hell is going on?” Kylar asked.

Dorian smirked. He looked Kylar up and down. “Amazing. You look exactly the same, but you’re totally different, aren’t you?”

Gods, had it only been a couple of months since he’d met Dorian?

“You’ve become formidable, Kylar. You have gravitas now. You’re a force to be reckoned with, but your mind hasn’t caught up with your power, has it? Reforming your identity is taking you time. That’s understandable. Not many people have to kill a father figure and become an immortal on the same day.”

“Get to the point.” Dorian always knew too much. It was unnerving.

“This is a dream, as you said. And yes, I did summon you. It’s a nice bit of magic I just discovered. I hope I remember it when I wake. If I wake. I’m not sure I’m asleep. I’m in one of my little reveries. I have been for a long time now. My body’s at Screaming Winds. Khali is coming. The garrison will fall. I’ll survive, but worse days are to come for me. I’ve been watching my own future, Kylar, something very dangerous to do. I’ve found a few things that have made me lose heart and stop looking. So while I’ve been marshaling my courage, I’ve been following you. I saw that you needed someone you could be honest with. Count Drake or Durzo would have been better, but they clearly can’t be here, so here I am. Even killers need friends.”

“I’m not a killer anymore. I’ve given that up.”

“In my visions,” Dorian said as if Kylar hadn’t spoken, “I see myself coming to a place where my happiness is one lie away. I will look into the eyes of the woman I love who also loves me and know that whether I lie or tell the truth, she’ll be devastated. In this, we are brothers, Kylar. The God gives simpler problems to lesser men. I’m here because you need me.”

Kylar’s pique unraveled. He looked into the fog. The entire place seemed a fit metaphor for his life—stuck in twilight with nothing definite, nothing solid, no simple path.

“I’m trying to change,” Kylar said, “but I’m not making it. I thought I could just break with my past and move and be done with it. I walk into a room and I case it. I look for exits, see how high the ceilings are, check potential threats, how good the traction on the floor is. If a man stares at me from an alley, I figure out how I’ll kill him—and it feels good. I feel in control.”

“Until?” Dorian asked.

Kylar hesitated. “Until I remember. I have to make myself think that my instincts are wrong. And then I hate what I’ve become.”

“And what have you become?” Dorian asked.

“A murderer.”

“You’re a liar and killer, but you’re no murderer, Kylar.”

“Well, thanks.”

“What’s the Night Angel, Kylar?”

“I don’t know. Durzo never told me.”

“Horseshit. Why don’t you trust yourself? Why don’t you ask Elene to trust you? Why don’t you trust her with the truth?”

“She’d never understand.”

“How do you know?”

What if she did? What if, once she knew him all the way down to the depths, then she rejected him? What would that do to him?

“You two are so young you don’t know your asses from your elbows,” Dorian said. “But you are starting to figure yourself out. Elene’s accepted a tiny box as her faith, and you’re way outside of what she knows about the God. She’s got the arrogance of youth that tells her that what she knows about the God is all there is to know about Him. She loves you, so she wants you to stay in that box with her. And that box is too small for you. You can’t understand a God who’s all mercy and no justice. That cute, fuzzy God wouldn’t last two minutes in the Warrens, would he? Well, I hate to tell you this, but Elene’s eighteen. All she knows about the God isn’t all that much.

“Kylar, I don’t think the God finds you abhorrent. The horror is having profound power in one hand and a strong moral sense in the other and absolutely no foundation to stand on. For the last couple of months, you’ve tried to accept Elene’s moral conclusions while rejecting her premises. And you say she’s not logical? Where do you stand, Shadow in Twilight?

“You’ve got choices to make, but here’s another hard truth: you can’t be whatever you want to be. The list of things you’ll never be is a long one—even if you do live forever. Do you want to know what’s at the top? Mild-mannered herbalist. You’re as meek as a wolf, Kylar—and that’s what Elene loves about you and it’s what she fears about you. You can’t keep telling her it’s all right, that this disguise is who you really are. It’s not. Why don’t you trust Elene enough to ask her to love the man you really are?”

“Because I hate him!” Kylar roared. “Because he loves killing! Because she doesn’t understand evil and he does. Because he never feels so alive as when I’m bathed in blood. Because he is a virtuoso with the sword and I love what he can do. Because he is the Night Angel and the angel is in the night and the night is in me! Because he is the Shadow That Walks. Because he believes some people cannot be saved, only stopped. Because when he kills an evil man, I feel not just the pleasure of mastery, I feel the whole world’s pleasure at the retribution—an evil man is an affront and I erase the blot. I balance the imbalance. He loves that—and Elene would have to lose the innocence I love about her for her to understand that man.”

“This man,” Dorian said, poking Kylar’s chest, “and this one—” he poked Kylar’s forehead—“are on their way to madness. Take it from one who knows.”