78
I won’t watch you kill yourself,” Durzo said. For the last three days, Kylar and Durzo had been traveling west. Durzo was traveling to Cenaria, to see Momma K at last, so he’d joined Kylar. The pass had been muddy and snowy, so they were setting up camp only a few hours from Torras Bend and a few hundred paces from Ezra’s Wood.
Kylar spread his heavy saddle blanket on a fallen log next to the fire and sat. “I don’t plan to die,” he said.
“Oh, so there is a plan? I thought you were making it up as you went. It’s getting dark. Our little stalker will be along within the hour.” They’d been followed, clumsily, since they left the Chantry. Today they’d ridden hard, trying to make it to Torras Bend, and their pursuer hadn’t been able to keep up.
“I don’t think Khali exists,” Kylar said.
“I didn’t realize you were in the habit of having religious epiphanies.”
“I mean, it exists, but I don’t think she’s a goddess.”
“Oh?” Durzo asked.
“She—it—is a repository of magic. The Wolf said magic is strongest when it’s attached to emotions. Khali is filled by the Khalidorans’ worship. As they hurt people for her, they chant a prayer. But it’s not a prayer. It’s a spell. It empties their glore vyrden into the repository. And it’s from that repository that the meisters and Vürdmeisters and Godkings draw their power. Because the talents for drawing in magic from the world and using magic are different, that means they can often use far more magic than mages. It means they can use it at night. Don’t you see? The entire nation chants this spell twice a day. The repository is the key to Khalidor’s power.”
“And this has something to do with why you’re committing suicide?”
“Curoch is anathema to that power. I saw that when I killed a meister with it. Curoch makes the vir explode. It bursts it from within.”
“A few months ago, you assassinated a man who called himself a god; now you’re going after a goddess in truth. Unless you can figure out a way to kill continents, after this you’re going to have to retire.”
“You know it’s not like that,” Kylar said, flushing.
“So you’re hoping to find Khali and put Curoch in her and what? Just see what happens?”
Kylar scowled. “You make it sound stupid.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s a way to win, really win, once and for all. Come on, how many times have you fought Khalidorans?”
“More than I like to remember,” Durzo admitted.
“Look, I lost Iures. That’s a disaster. I know it. It’s also a disaster you helped cause when you never told me what the damn thing was. With Iures in Neph’s hands, we’re going to have a hard time killing him.”
“We?”
“But if we destroy the vir, Neph won’t even be able to use Iures. If he survives the vir’s destruction, even if he has Talent, it will take him a while to think to use it. He’ll be vulnerable. Master, he’s been spending the last three months figuring out how to break into Ezra’s Wood and take Curoch for himself. If one man holds both Curoch and Iures . . .”
“It wouldn’t be good.”
“It would be a cataclysm!” Kylar said.
“You realize that if you put Curoch into the center of all the vir in the world, it might make a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference?”
“Huh?”
Durzo shot him an exasperated look. “Curoch blew the vir out of one wytch and nothing happened. If it blows up all the vir in the world, something might.”
“If it blew up every wytch in the world, I wouldn’t complain,” Kylar said.
“And if it blows you up with them?”
“At that point, I won’t be able to.”
“It might not obliterate you. It might just kill you and invoke your immortality. You know what that costs now. Are you willing to risk a friend’s life for this? Hell, it might be my life. I don’t know if I’m willing for you to risk it.”
“We were given this power for a reason, master. I don’t want to lose anyone. I don’t want to die, but if my death can change a nation, if I can save thousands, how could I not risk it?”
Durzo grinned ruefully. “You damn fool. You realize, even if all your assumptions are correct—even then, you still have to steal the world’s most coveted sword from the world’s safest place then be pursued by the ultimate hunter until you reach the heart of an enemy country in the middle of a war in which any side will happily kill you as a traitor, a spy, a wytch, or all three?”
“I thought you’d like it,” Kylar said, eyes sparkling.
Durzo laughed. “The Wolf is gonna have puppies.”
“Well, I’m hoping not to see him any time soon. But I figured if I could convince you, then there wouldn’t be much he could do about it.”
“Convince me of what?” Durzo asked.
“To help,” Kylar said.
“Oh no,” Durzo said. “Count me out.”
“You can’t!”
“I can. Kid, you took away my immortality. That gave me back my life. I—”
“You owe me!” Kylar said.
“Not like this, I don’t. I have one life left. One. Because of you, I can do with it whatever I want. I can love.”
And Kylar couldn’t. “But we can change the world!”
“Kid, do you know how many times I’ve changed the world? The Tlaxini Maelstrom used to be a shipping lane. The Alitaeran Empire stretched from coast to coast. Godkings have threatened the southlands and nearly gained ka’kari half a dozen times. Ladesh used to—look. The fact is, I’ve done my piece. Adventures are for the young, and I’m young by no measure. There’s a woman I love in Cenaria, and neither of us is getting younger. I need to go.”
“I need you,” Kylar said. “Alone, trying to steal the world’s most coveted sword from the world’s safest place and being pursued by the perfect hunter into a war—”
“Yes, yes,” Durzo said. “I’ve showed you most of my tricks—”
“Most of them?”
“—and you’ve developed a few of your own. You’re not an apprentice anymore, Kylar—”
“Fine, but I’m hardly—”
“—you are a master. Your tutelage is finished.”
“Don’t cut me loose,” Kylar said. His heart was in his throat.
“I’m cutting you free,” Durzo said.
“But you’re still better than me!”
“And I always will be,” Durzo said. He grinned, and despite himself, Kylar couldn’t help thinking that it was nice to see this once hard and bitter man smile. “In your memories. I’m smart enough to stop fighting you before you start winning. I reached the top of my game, and I had a good run. From here, I’ll only get worse.”
“But you still have so much to teach me.”
“You think this isn’t going to teach you something?”
“What if I fail?” It came out in a whisper.
“What if you do? It won’t change how I feel about you.”
“But I could doom the world! Don’t you care?”
“If I spend my last hours in Gwin’s arms, frankly, not much. Growing old with the woman I love would be my first choice, but dying reconciled with her isn’t a bad second.”
“So I’m alone.”
“I told you that was the cost when you demanded to be my apprentice.”
“I didn’t know I was agreeing to eternity!”
“Cry me a river. You’re pathetic. What’s your plan for getting into the Wood?”
Stung, Kylar shrugged. “The ka’kari.”
“The ka’kari.” Durzo stated the question like Momma K would have. The old man really had spent too long with her.
“It absorbs magic, eludes magic, makes me invisible. I’ll figure something out.” Now he was sounding defensive.
“Whose Wood is this again?” Durzo asked. “Oh yeah, Ezra’s. And who made the ka’kari? Oh, don’t tell me. Ezra.”
“Ezra didn’t make the black.”
“He understood it well enough to make six others. So tell me, fifty years after making six ka’kari he comes here—and at this point he and I aren’t on such good terms—and he makes himself a fortress. You think it never occurred to him that I might try to come in?”
“Uh . . .”
“Kid, you can scare a few Sisters with raw power and bravado, but you’re playing on a different plane here. If you live through Ezra’s defenses—which by the way, you strengthened tenfold by throwing Curoch into the wood—you still have to get around a creature so powerful and so cunning that it may have killed Ezra himself, unless it is Ezra gone utterly mad. Either way, the Hunter isn’t going to be impressed by raw magic. Your newfound confidence is inspiringly suicidal.”
Kylar was silent. Then he said, “I won’t be stopped.”
“Shut up, she comes.”
Kylar rolled the ka’kari into the center of the fire. The flames collapsed into the ball, dying instantly, plunging the clearing into darkness. Kylar jumped left and Durzo rolled right even as purple magic blazed through the clearing in jagged hands. Kylar extended a hand and the ka’kari leapt into it, flooding him with the energy it had absorbed from the fire.
He leapt from tree to tree, sinking black claws into the sides of each, and saw a maja flailing about herself, suddenly blind. Fires flared around her. She flipped them back and forth wildly like great scythes in her fear. The magic slapped against the trees, singeing bark, sending up gouts of steam, but the recent rains and snows prevented any fires from bursting forth. Durzo, on the ground, was beneath the swipes, and Kylar was above them.
In moments, the maja had exhausted her Talent and with no sunlight and no fire to draw from, her magic guttered out.
In the sudden darkness, both men moved. Kylar was on her almost before she could scream. He flew straight over her head, grabbed fistfuls of cloak and robe as he passed, and used her body weight like a beam to flip himself over and stop, which transferred his momentum to her. She flew backward half a dozen paces and crashed into a tree trunk, the breath whooshing from her lungs. Kylar landed on one knee on the forest floor and stood, blue flame trickling over his features.
By the time she’d taken two breaths, something was rising from deep beneath her skin. It was vir, and it rose as rapidly as a shark striking from the deep, starting at her fingertips, over her hands, and wrists, disappearing in a wriggle that made her sleeves tremble, up to her neck like a black blush, and then—it stopped. Durzo stood behind the tree trunk, his arms wrapped around it, fingers poking into two points in the side of the maja’s neck. She shrieked as the vir bulged against the blockage like a river at flood assailing a levee. Her cries crested and then fell as the vir receded, faded and sank beneath her skin once more.
Durzo stepped from behind the tree and grabbed her by the scruff on her neck. Holding her before him, he buried his fingers in those points on her neck again.
“A trick you didn’t teach me?” Kylar asked.
“You expect me to teach you all I know in a couple months? The vir needs a physical expression. Block the physical expression and you block the magical. It’s a weakness of the Ursuul family’s hidden vir.”
“She’s an Ursuul?”
“What better use for Garoth’s Talented daughters?” Durzo asked.
“I thought he had them killed.”
“Garoth wasn’t a man to throw away tools, no matter how blunt. What’s your name, sweetie?”
She didn’t answer, so Kylar did for her. “It’s Eris Buel. You little bitch. We had our suspicions about you.”
“Not enough to save your precious wife,” she snapped. In her eyes rose such hatred that Kylar felt his gift unfolding, saw the murders littering Eris’s path to power, but there was no dead Elene, nor Vi. He saw betrayals, broken vows, and, far down on the list, receiving Kylar’s sword from a thief and then delivering the blade to Neph’s spies.
All the darkness demanded an answer. “Justice has been denied you too long,” Kylar said. His dagger punched through Eris’s solar plexus, driving the breath from her lungs once more, and her guilty eyes flared wide, the light in them dimming.
A hand cracked hard against Kylar’s cheek. Kylar staggered from the force of the blow. “Dammit, we need to question her, you fool!” Durzo shouted. Durzo grabbed Eris by her hair, holding her upright. “The ka’kari, Kylar, give me the ka’kari, quick!”
Kylar handed it to his master. The bastard had nearly torn off his jaw. Kylar put a hand to his face and took it off, sticky. Kylar looked at his fingers. It wasn’t blood.
Durzo dropped Eris’s body.
Kylar rubbed the golden liquid between his fingers. “Peri peri and xanthos?” Kylar asked. It was a contact poison, and though it would only leave him unconscious, the tincture still left permanent scarring. “On my face?”
“You deserve a permanent slap-print, but you heal too well.”
“Why?” Kylar’s legs were getting shaky.
“I needed this,” Durzo said, lifting the ka’kari. “Sweet dreams.”
Kylar crumpled to the ground and his lips smashed on a root. His mouth filled with blood. The bastard could have at least caught me.