Perfect Shadow (3 page)

But Gaelan wasn’t blind. The shadows had welcomed his eyes since he bonded the ka’kari. No one was in his room. His magical seals on the windows remained.

He went to bed, not having confronted anyone, not having killed anyone. It was the right move. Patience was a lesson immortality should have taught him long ago.

Wisdom is boring.

“You’re the best I’ve ever had,” Gaelan said, after their fourth round of lovemaking.

“I get that a lot,” Gwinvere said. Teasing, but keeping her distance, her professionalism. They lay together in her bedchamber, naked, her head on his chest.

Not from men who are 680 years old.

He tweaked her nipple in punishment. She laughed, and he joined her.

“Someone followed me here,” Gaelan said. “One of your people?”

A half second of hesitation, a bit of tension in her body against him. A yes. But she didn’t try to lie. “He followed you last night, too. I wanted to see if you’d report to anyone that I was trying to hire you.”

“Mm-hmm. So what you want me to do is treasonous. And all you know is that I don’t have to report daily. Maybe I’m just on a long leash.” So he had done the right thing. Killing a servant of the Nine mightn’t have been the best way to start in a new city.

She traced designs idly on his chest, weighing her words. Finally, she said, “You’re a risk I’ll take. You’ve heard of wetboys?”

“Magic-using assassins?”

“There’s only a limited number of them at any one time. No one ever knows how many. But they all swear a magically binding oath of fealty to the Shinga. They can’t harm him or take contracts without his approval. Right now, there are only five wetboys. I want you to kill four of them.”

“And the fifth?”

“Will train you. He was the man who followed you last night and today. Ben Wrable.”

“Scarred Wrable?” Gaelan had heard the name, but not much else.

“He’s got a few…quirks.”

There was only one reason you’d get rid of all the Shinga’s assassins if you were already on the Nine. “And after I kill these wetboys? You want me to kill the Nine as well? The Shinga?”

She sat up, and despite his satiety, he couldn’t help but look at her body first, then her eyes. “No,” she said. “I’m taking care of them in other ways.”

“So you become Shinga, and I become a wetboy who hasn’t sworn the oath of obedience to you. After using me, won’t you find me too dangerous to keep around?”

A pause. “You’re a clear thinker, Gaelan Starfire. I like that. Most men would have expressed some shock at being asked to kill. Or some doubt about a woman running the Sa’kagé.”

I’ve known Irenaea Blochwei and Ihel Nooran. No doubts.
“So?” he said instead.

“You’ll look into my history, of course. See how I’ve treated prostitutes who retire. Find out how I treated rivals who ended up working for me. See what place malice and vengeance hold in how I rule.”

“Tell me.” He would check, too, of course, but he liked to hear it from the woman herself.

“Vengeance only when my power is in question. Not for personal satisfaction. I don’t throw away tools lightly. Especially sharp ones. If I send you after four wetboys and you kill them all, and you learn the secrets of the fifth, how could I possibly threaten you? I would rather keep you.”

“A pet?”

“An ally. A lover—insofar as you don’t interfere with my work or who I bed.”

“You won’t ever ask me to take the magical oath?”

“I don’t think I’ll need to.” She smiled. Beautiful.

“That’s not what I asked,” Gaelan said.

She smiled more broadly, pleased to be matched. “I won’t ever ask or compel you to take any sort of oath of obedience.”

“So if I do this, what are you going to give me? Aside from piles of coin and the best lovemaking of my life? Which I take as a given.”

She smiled again, then said, “A network of spies who will find the man you’re looking for.”

A fist of stone wrapped around Gaelan’s chest. A long moment. He couldn’t breathe. “Very well,” he said finally. “Assuming everything is as you’ve said. I’ll check, and you have this Scarred Wrable meet me at my inn tomorrow night.”

She smiled. Trailed her fingers down the lines of his abs. Lower. “One more time?” she asked.

Scarred Wrable was a lanky man of Friaki ancestry. Round-cheeked and sallow-skinned, with hair like a sheaf of black wheat and the long, lean muscles of a martial artist. He was seated in Gaelan’s bed, in his locked room. The seals on the door were intact, the lock not obviously picked. Professional pride.

“Ben Wrable?” Gaelan asked. Gwinvere’s story had checked out, as he had expected it would. She was ferocious when crossed, but magnanimous when she could be. Generous to the best or those she suspected could be the best. Never one to destroy what could instead serve. Liked kids.

Ben rose and two daggers popped out of nowhere, flying, hilts first.

Gaelan snatched them out of the air, unthinking.

Ben grinned recklessly. “The Night Angels favor you,” he said.

“Night Angels?” Gaelan asked. His heart dropped into his guts. The wetboy opened the window, cracking the magical seals Gaelan had put on them.

Scarred Wrable said, “Come, the Devil’s Highway awaits. Follow as well as you can. First test.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with the ka’kari,” the little redhead Yvor Vas says. He is a member of a secret organization called the Society of the Second Sun. They are ostensibly dedicated to studying the ka’kari. In truth, they study immortality, which they believe the ka’kari gives. They’re a loose-knit organization, though, because for all that they hope otherwise, the ka’kari-given immortality can’t be shared, and most of them suspect as much.

“The ka’kari is what brought me to Cenaria in the first place,” I say.

“Looking for one? Or because the one you already have told you to come?”

I drain another flagon. Every since I bonded the ka’kari, it takes me a lot to get drunk.

It wasn’t the first time that Gaelan had traversed the rooftops of a city—both Rebus Nimble and Dav Slinker had had rocky relationships with the law. But both of those men had lived in cities with more stable construction materials. It was one thing to jump from wattle roof to wattle roof or from stone to stone, quite another to jump from slate and bamboo to thatch to crumbling terra cotta. Cenaria grew or mined very little of its own resources, so builders used whatever they could get.

In cities where you could trust your footing, you could move faster, take great leaps. Here, Gaelan and Ben Wrable moved at little more than a sprint, jumping lightly and landing lightly.

Gaelan landed on a section of terra cotta that crumbled under his feet, rolled, and sprinted on.

“Good!” Ben shouted from a far rooftop. “You pass. Second test!”

Ben crossed his arms over his chest and stepped off the peaked roof he was standing on.

Gaelan leapt across the gap to the roof and ran to the spot where the wetboy had disappeared. There was nothing there. Wind. Misting rain. He searched the darkness, muscles tensed. But even his preternatural sight didn’t help.

“Here,” a voice whispered.

Gaelan whipped around, daggers coming out, dropping low. There was nothing where the voice had come from.

Something slammed into the back of his knee and swept him off his feet. He fell, tumbling down the steep roof. The daggers went flying as his fingertips fought for purchase on the slate tiles.

He fell off the roof. He swung his hands, expecting a gutter—some kind of edge. Nothing. There were only a few decorative dog gargoyles. He reached. Missed.

Phantom hands made of pure magic whipped out beyond his own fingers and snagged the gargoyle. He pulled so hard he ripped it right off—and threw himself back up and onto the roof.

He landed in a fighting stance, a Plangan style, almost ludicrously low, but helpful with the steep pitch of the roof here in case he had to use his hands.

But Ben Wrable was standing, arms folded, chuckling.

“Looks like you don’t know everything yet, sword swinger.”

“You can throw your voice,” Gaelan said.

Ben smiled.

“You won’t catch me like that again,” Gaelan vowed.

Ben walked over to the edge, looked down at where the dog gargoyle lay shattered far below. A crowd had gathered, alarmed, looking up. “Enough entertainment for the locals.”

“Where’d you pick up this style?” Gaelan asked as they sparred the next night. Ben Wrable’s style with the staff reminded him of Peerson Jules, one of the last non-crazy Lae’knaught underlords. That had been two hundred years ago.

“Made it up,” Ben said. “My own master only did bladed weapons.” He grabbed a pair of sais off the wall and slowly faded from sight. Embracing the shadows, he called it. In bright light, it reduced him to a man-size smudge of inky blackness—nothing close to invisibility, nothing close to what Gaelan could do with the aid of his ka’kari—but on a dark night it was pretty damn good.

He could muffle his steps, too.

They trained with every weapon imaginable. Ben was fast, and Gaelan was a fast learner. Ben was obviously impressed with the warrior, though Gaelan tried to hide some of his more impressive skills. Ben also mentioned other wetboy skills that he himself didn’t practice and gave Gaelan an enormous tome of poisons: “My master had, uh, an accident before he could teach me most of this, and I’m a bad reader.”

“That’s awfully generous.”

“Don’t worry. I’m charging Gwinvere for it.”

Ah. Ben couldn’t read the coded notations, so the book was worthless to him, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could fence. Who’d buy it? If someone did, they might be your enemy. Far better to charge a friend full price and make it their problem. Clever.

Ben wasn’t much help with disguises, though, saying with his scars he wasn’t going to pass as anything other than himself.

He watched Gaelan shoot the bow, nailing a bull’s-eye ten times in a row from a hundred paces—Gaelan was justly famous for his archery—and said, “Looks like we won’t need to cover that.”

Gaelan couldn’t master the art of throwing his voice, though. Ben could mimic voices perfectly, as well—something Gaelan was certain was akin to the more massive sorts of body magic he himself did.

Teaching Ben a few of his own tricks would have been only fair, but much as Gaelan liked Ben, the man was a stone killer. Gaelan wasn’t going to teach a wetboy those abilities.

One day, two weeks in, they were fighting sickle against chain spear. They’d been working for ten hours, sweating copiously from the fire they kept going in the room to refill their Talents. Ben threw off his tunic and Gaelan saw the rest of the man’s scars for the first time.

The Friaki were much more likely to scar with keloids than people of other nations: their bodies pushing scars outward, giving them a raised appearance. Ben Wrable was covered with self-inflicted keloid scars from his neck to his fingertips.

“I was a
gorathi
’s son. A prince, if you will. I was kidnapped as a young boy from my clan. A great insult to my father. In Friaku, a son is his father’s strength. I was brought here and sold into the Death Games, where I excelled. When I won my freedom, I went back to Friaku, but my clan had been massacred long ago. No one knew their names. For all I know, the slave traders lied, and I’m just a peasant’s son. I’ll never know.”

The Friaki had a taboo against speaking about the dead. Ben might have spoken to his own uncle, and if he hadn’t approached the subject just the right way, the man would have denied knowing anything. Not having been raised there, Ben wouldn’t have known.

“What’s that one for?” Gaelan asked. Most of the scars appeared to be gibberish. Designs interspersed with guesses at Friaki script. In the center of his chest, though, he had cut a large circle, split halfway by a single line, straight down his sternum. That scar had been cut and recut many times.

“I had a pendant, made of two iron horseshoe nails. It was taken from me when I came to train for the Death Games. I cut it into myself so I’d never forget. No one I spoke to in Friaku had seen it before. Have you?”

“No,” Gaelan lied. Ben Wrable was a man cut off from a home he would never know. A man who’d been destroyed while still a child. A man trying to hold on to one small thing, driven near madness trying to hold on to his Friaki identity, because he sure as hell didn’t belong anywhere else.

Besides, referents change, especially the referents of universal symbols like lines and circles. And it had been a long time since Gaelan had lived in Friaku.

But the truth was Gaelan just didn’t have the heart to tell Ben what it really meant.

There is no heroism.

There is no justice.

There is no heaven.

Gaelan wasn’t dressed in black. It wasn’t night. He wore a plain blue tradesman’s tunic and a big, worn hat, and he had his cloak draped over his lap. He was sitting on the ruined base of an old statue—long since torn down—and eating a loaf of bread and cutting sausage to go with it. The sun was going down, and this Warrens market bordering the Plith River was beginning to close for the day. A few stalls would stay open for another hour or so, hawking hot food for those heading home. But the boat shops that came and docked and sold their wares were already pushing off, not willing to spend the night docked in the crime-ridden Warrens.

It was busy, but not packed. Gaelan saw his target enter the market from the far side. He was a plain man, could have been a tradesman himself. But Gwinvere’s sketch had been very good. It was the wetboy, Nils Skelling. He was reputed to be the best man alive with an axe, despite his small stature. Great climber. Fearless swimmer. Excellent in unarmed combat, said to have killed fifteen Lae’knaught Lancers with his bare hands. Said to have quite a sense of humor, too. Nils was walking along the edge of the pier. The crowd tended to be thinner there, because sometimes when the crowd suddenly swelled, those at the edge would get pushed into the sewage-befouled water.