Brent Weeks - Way of Shadows

Specks of magic leapt up to meet it. The meisters, Neph could tell. The meisters who hadn’t already been holding their vir grabbed it. They might as well have been flies trying to extinguish a bonfire with the wind from their wings. The magic sought them out, wrapped around them, burned them to pillars of ash. He could feel the tendrils of their power snapping, bursting apart one by one.

The conflagration was in the courtyard, in that odd Cenarian statue garden. Should Neph stay here and live? Did he dare go face that fire? What would this titan of a mage do if Neph dared to confront him? What would the God-king do to him if he didn’t?

An odd, detached thought came to Kylar as he opened the last door and walked toward the throne room. That’s why those guards outside the Maw were nervous—they were bait. Now I am, too.

His next thought was of Durzo’s creed: Life is empty. It was a creed Durzo himself had betrayed, an empty creed. It neither saved life nor made it better. For a wetboy, it made life safer because it obliterated his conscience. Or tried to. Durzo had tried to live that creed and had found himself too noble for it.

Kylar wondered what had brought him to this. He was ready to die. Was it pride, that he thought he could defy any odds? Was it duty to Durzo, that he thought he had to pay back the debt of his life by saving Uly? Was it revenge, that he hated Roth so much that he would die to kill him? Was it love?

Love? I’m a fool. He felt something for Elene, it was true. Something intense and intoxicating and unreasonable. Maybe it was love, but what did he love, Elene or an image of her, glimpsed from afar, pieced together with the glue of assumption?

Maybe it was just some last vestige of romanticism that had brought him here, some sludge left over from the stories of princes and heroes Ulana Drake had read to him. Maybe he’d spent too long with people who believed in false virtues like valor and self-sacrifice that Durzo had tried to teach him to despise. Maybe he’d been infected.

But why he was here didn’t really matter. This was the right thing to do. He was worthless. If his empty life could ransom Elene’s life, then he would have accomplished something good. It would be the only thing he had ever done that he could be proud of. And if he gave Uly a chance too, so much the better.

He’d have his own chance, too: his chance at Roth. Kylar had gone into other fights feeling confident, but this was different. As he stepped into the short hall to the throne room, Kylar felt at peace.

A high-pitched whine cut the air. The men who’d been standing in the room looking to the door adjusted their grips on their weapons.

A magical alarm to tell them I’ve arrived, then.

There were highlanders, of course. He’d expected that. But he hadn’t expected thirty. And there were wytches. He’d expected that, too. But not five.

The doors at the dead end where he’d lifted Elene and Uly banged open and another ten highlanders poured in behind him.

Taking a few quick steps, Kylar leapt into the throne room at the level of the floor, hoping to make it past the first attacks. The room was huge, the ivory and horn throne set above the seats of the assembly by two broad sets of seven steps separated by a flat landing. Roth sat in the throne, flanked by two wytches. The others stood on the landing. The highlanders were spread around the perimeter of the room.

The leap took him past the whirring swords of two highlanders who were cutting blindly at the air in front of the door, hoping to get lucky and hit the invisible wetboy.

Drawing Retribution from its back scabbard, Kylar rolled to his feet.

A swarm of tiny hands appeared in the air as the wytches chanted. The hands were looking for him, plucking at him. They seethed over the ground leaping and clawing at each other as they groped for him.

He jumped away, cutting at the hands, but his sword passed through them harmlessly; there was nothing for him to cut.

They swarmed over him and the hands thickened, strengthened as two of the wytches chanted in time with each other. Then, as the hands pulled him upright, Kylar felt something else seize him. He felt like a baby caught in giant’s fingers.

It tore at him and he felt the ka’kari’s cloaking strip open. He let it go. It wouldn’t do him much good to be partly invisible if he couldn’t move.

Well, that was glorious. In all the history of stupid men intentionally springing traps set for them, that was probably the lamest result ever.

Kylar had hoped—hell, expected—that he’d at least take a few guards with him. Maybe a wytch. Two would have been nice. Durzo would be shaking his head in disgust.

“I knew you’d come, Blint,” Roth crowed from the throne. He hopped to his feet and waved to the wytches. Kylar was lifted off his feet and shot forward, carried magically up the stairs and deposited on the landing below the throne.

Blint? Gods. I sprang a trap that wasn’t even set for me.

The magic fingers tore away Kylar’s mask. “Kylar?” Roth said, astonished. He burst out laughing.

“My prince, beware,” a red-haired wytch at Roth’s right said. “He has the ka’kari.”

Roth slapped his hands together and laughed again, as if unable to believe his luck. “And just in time! Oh, Kylar, if I were another man, I’d almost let you live.”

The witty riposte dried on Kylar’s tongue as he saw into Roth’s eyes. If most of his deaders had a cupful of darkness in their souls, Roth had a river, boundless and bleak, a roaring, devouring darkness with a voice like thunder. Here was a man who hated all that was lovely.

“Captain,” Roth said, “where are the girl and the scarred wench?”

One of the men who’d entered after Kylar said, “We’ve lost them, Your Majesty.”

“I’m disappointed, Captain,” Roth said, but his voice was jubilant. “Unlose them.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” the soldier said. He grabbed his ten highlanders and headed back into the hall.

Roth turned back to Kylar. “Now,” he said. “Dessert. Kylar, do you know how long I’ve been looking for you?”

Kylar blinked and tore himself away, somehow shut his senses off to the evil in the man before him. He forced nonchalance into his voice. “Since I’m the man who’s going to kill you, I’d guess—oh, since you first looked in a mirror and realized just how damn ugly you are.”

Roth clapped his hands. “How droll. You know, Kylar, I feel like you’ve been in my shadow for years, opposing everything I’ve done. Stealing my ka’kari really irritated me.”

“Well, I aim to vex,” Kylar said. He wasn’t really listening. Opposing him for years? Roth really was crazy. Kylar didn’t even know him. But let the man rant as long as he wanted. Kylar surreptitiously flexed against the bonds of magic.

They were like steel. This was not going well. Kylar didn’t have a plan. He didn’t even have the beginning of a plan. He didn’t think that there was a plan that might have worked even if he’d been smart enough to think of it. The Khalidoran soldiers had encircled him, the wytches were watching him like vultures, their vir wiggling faintly, and Roth looked altogether far too pleased with himself.

“And vex you do. You seem to turn up at the most inopportune moments.”

“Just like that rash you picked up from the rent boys, huh?”

“Oh, personality. Excellent. I haven’t had a really satisfying kill since yesterday.”

“If you fell on your sword, we’d all be satisfied.”

“You had your chance to kill me, Kylar.” Roth shrugged. “You failed. But I didn’t know you were a wetboy. I only got your real name yesterday, and killing you had to wait while I gained a kingdom for my father.”