Brent Weeks - Way of Shadows

When he got to the east side, he stole a horse. He was thinking about the Night Angels. Blint had talked about them over the years, but Kylar had never paid any attention to him. He’d always thought them just another superstition, some last vestige of old, dead gods.

Then Kylar thought about how Elene would take it even if he did rescue her. The thought made him ill. She was in gaol because of him. She thought he’d killed the prince. She hated him. He tried to plan how he was going to kill Roth—a man who would be guarded by meisters, Khalidoran highlanders, and maybe the odd Sa’kagé basher. That didn’t make Kylar feel any better. The more he thought, the worse he felt.

He didn’t even know if meisters could see him when he was cloaked, but the only way he could test that had serious drawbacks. He had, however, finally used his head and taken a look at himself in a mirror to see if the ka’kari was as effective as he thought. He’d been amazed. Wetboys bragged about being ghosts, about being invisible, but that was all it was: braggadocio. No one was invisible.

The only other wetboy Kylar had seen go stealthing looked like a big blob of an indeterminate something. Blint had looked like a six foot smear of mottled darkness—good enough for all practical purposes when the light was poor. And when Blint held still, he dwindled to a shadow of a shadow.

But Kylar was invisible. All wetboys became more visible when they moved. When Kylar moved, there wasn’t so much as a distortion in the air.

It almost irritated him that he’d spent so much time learning to sneak without his Talent. It seemed like wasted effort. Then he thought of having to sneak past the wytches. Maybe the effort wasn’t wasted after all.

He rode up Sidlin Way to Horak Road, then veered around the Jadwin estate, leaving his horse and cloaking himself with the ka’kari. The sun was setting as he scouted East Kingsbridge.

As he’d expected, the security was daunting. A score of Khalidoran regulars were stationed in front of the gate. Two meisters paced among them. Two more talked together on the other side of the gate. At least four boats patrolled Vos Island, going around it in measured circles.

It was a good thing Kylar wasn’t planning on getting into the castle. It was a good thing he’d come with a small arsenal. Dodging from rock to rock, tree to shrub, Kylar moved to the bridge. He unlimbered the heavy crossbow from his pack. He hated crossbows. They were unwieldy, slow, and could be shot by any idiot who could point.

Kylar fitted the special bolt in place, checked the silk spool and braced his body against the side of the bridge. What was it that Blint used to tell him? That he should practice more with weapons he didn’t like?

Scowling, Kylar aimed. Thanks to the iron sheathing on the bridge pilings, his target was tiny. He’d have to hit the last piling above the iron sheathing where the wood was exposed, a target four inches wide from forty paces away, with a slight breeze. This crossbow’s accuracy at that range was within two inches. So he had two inches to spare.

If he erred, he had to make sure he erred right. Up or down and the bolt would hit iron—and the sound would wake the dead. Left and the bolt would fly past the bridge and hit the rocks of the castle, and probably rebound to splash in the river.

Kylar hated crossbows.

He waited until the boat was almost directly underneath the bridge. If he made the shot— when he made it—he’d take advantage of the boatmen having just left the brilliance of the dying sun and coming into the shadow of the castle. Their vision wouldn’t be good. He exhaled half a breath and pulled smoothly, riding the release point until the catch gave.

The bolt sped from the crossbow, the spool whizzing faintly—and the bolt sailed four inches to the right of the last piling.

Kylar grabbed the still-unreeling rope as it went taut. The bolt jerked to a stop not three feet from the castle wall.

The bolt started falling and Kylar pulled it in hand over hand as fast as he could. The rope draped over one of the crossbeams to the right of the piling he’d aimed for. It swung back toward the piling. Kylar dragged in rope as fast as he could, but the bolt pinged off the iron sheathing.

The hooks on the bolt caught and Kylar drew the rope taut, flush against the underside of the bridge.

A meister stepped to the edge of the bridge, holding onto the railing nervously. He looked down and saw the boat passing under the bridge. “Hey!” he called. “Watch it!”

A lightly armed boatman looked up, squinting in the gloom. “Right, you piece of—” He swallowed his words as he realized he was speaking to a meister.

The meister disappeared and the boatman starting haranguing his rowers. Both boatman and wytch thought the other had made the sound.

Without pausing to consider how lucky he was, Kylar secured his end of the line and hid the crossbow. The next boat was still a good distance away. Kylar threw a leg over the line, approached the precipice that sloped off to the river, and slipped out into space.

For a long time, he thought he was going to die as the silk rope drooped toward the river. It’s come free! But he held on, and the rope finally accepted his weight. He climbed across the chasm almost upside down, pulling himself with his hands, his legs crossed over the rope. The droop of the rope meant that after he crossed the halfway point he was climbing sideways and up.

Instead of fighting it, Kylar just pulled himself as far as the second-to-last piling. He looked at the iron sheathing. It was pitted with age and exposure. It was also vertical. Not exactly the best climbing surface.

There was no good choice. Kylar had to get off the rope before the next boat came. He was invisible, but the drooping rope wasn’t.

He flung himself from the rope to the piling—and fell. He slapped all of his limbs around the iron sheathing, but its diameter was so great that his arms couldn’t reach around it. The uneven iron surface didn’t provide enough friction to stop his descent, but it was enough to tear at the skin on the insides of his arms and his inner thighs.

He hit the water slowly enough that the splash was quiet. He clambered back up to the surface and held himself against the piling as the next boat passed.

With the number of weapons he was wearing, he couldn’t swim, but when he pushed himself off the piling, he sank close enough to shore that he was able to walk along the river bottom and pull himself out of the water before he drowned. Barely.

He moved north, along the same route he’d followed the night before. Kylar was glad Blint was dead. The wetboy would never have let him live this down. Between the missed shot and the undoubtedly embarrassing cuts he’d have on his inner thighs, Blint would have had gibes for a decade. Kylar could hear it now: “Remember that time you tried to hump the bridge?”

Kylar found a perch inside the boathouse and cleaned his weapons. He’d have to assume that all of his poisons had washed away—for the second day in a row. He wrung out his clothes, but didn’t dare take the time to let them dry fully. Now that he was here, he wanted to get in and get out, fast. He looked around the boathouse. It wasn’t guarded. Evidently the Khalidorans thought their patrols were enough.

Two men guarded the long ramp down that led to the Maw. They were tense, obviously uncomfortable with their assignment. Kylar didn’t blame them. Between the stink, the periodic cries, and the occasional rumblings in the earth, he wouldn’t have been comfortable either.

Retribution slashed left and right and the men died. He pulled their bodies into the brush and took the keys to the door.

The entrance to the Maw was designed to terrify the men and women incarcerated there. On opening the gate, Kylar saw that the ramp down did indeed look like a tongue leading down a gigantic throat. Hooked teeth were carved out of the black volcanic glass around him, and torches were set behind red glass to look like two flickering, demonic eyes.