Return to the New York Times bestselling world of the Night Angel, where master assassin Kylar embarks on a new adventure as the High King Logan Gyre calls on him to save his kingdom and the hope of peace.

Read an exclusive, extended early excerpt of Night Angel Nemesis below!

 

Chapter One: An Innocent Kill

He’s young and likely innocent and I wish it made a difference. If he doesn’t move in the next three minutes, this kid has to die.

Most people don’t understand my work: They think murder is the hard part.

In the beginning, maybe—when you’re fourteen years old, hiding under a bed, breath loud, knuckles white on the steel, eyes hot with tomorrow’s tears, footsteps approaching.

But even then the hard part wasn’t the destined dead; the hard part was the living. They never follow the plan. The living always crowd forward, treading on the heels of those fated to die, as if when they meet Death, they’ll nod a greeting and pass on by.

My first time, it was a castle maid, coming to check on her worthless lover I’d been sent to kill. He was leaving her; instead she joined him in eternity. My first murder of an innocent.

Now it’s this kid.

What’s a kid doing out playing ball at this hour? Why’s he got to be here?

From my perch I feel as if he’s a thousand paces away, tiny across the chasm of experience, and I alone atop a cliff—though he’s merely on the ground, and I on a rooftop across the alley.

He has a few rocks set out to show the width of the goal. As I watch, he spins around an imaginary defender, bounces the ball once, then kicks it against the compound’s wall.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-chunk

Over and over. He puts his hands up and makes a sound like a crowd roaring its approval. Young kid, twelve maybe, all stupidity and big dreams. Maybe he thinks he’s found his one way out of these slums.

~Remind you of anyone?~

I ignore the ka’kari speaking in my head. If it weren’t so helpful when it wants to be, I’d throw the damned thing as far away from me as I could.

Twilight is a burning fuse, and soon the sun will explode merciless on the horizon, revealing all I’ve done or left undone. But still I wait, hoping I’ll find some third way.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-chunk

He’s just a kid.

But he’s not giving up his practicing.

Knowing what it may mean, am I really going to do this?

Yes, yes I am. She’s worth it. They deserve justice.

All right, that’s it. Morning’s coming. Time’s up for both of us.

I move, dropping silently from the roof into the deeper shadows of the alley.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-

Streaking in from nowhere, I snag the ball out of the air. Left-handed, no less. Maybe I missed my calling. I could’ve been a streetball great.

The kid’s jaw drops and his eyes go ridiculously wide at the sight of me. It’s a bit satisfying, in that I-feel-proud-that-I-can-scare-children sort of way. Is this one of those dark pleasures of power Count Drake tried to warn me about? I haven’t dressed to impress. Tonight—this morning technically—I’m in my mottled black-and-grays with a hood and face mask, an unstrung bow tucked away and a black short sword in a tension-release back scabbard.

~There’s something interesting about the ball.~

I look at it. It’s leather over a goat-belly air bladder, stitched into nearly a perfect sphere. Kids in this neighborhood usually make do with a wad of rags and twine.

“I’m gonna ask you a favor, kid,” I growl. “My business isn’t with you. So I’m asking you to leave. Quietly. Please. You understand? There’s a man out tonight who’d kill a child.”

I pause long enough for him to wonder whether I mean myself or the dirtbag noble who lives in the compound beyond this wall.

Lives, but maybe I’ll remedy that.

“He give you this?” I ask, spinning the ball on one finger, then another. “Lord Repha’im?”

The kid can’t even nod yes, frozen, but I know I’m right. Such gifts are a cheap way for a man to buy loyalty in a slum like this.

“You’re the Night Angel,” the kid chokes out. “You’re Kylar Stern.”

The ball’s spinning slows, stops, but it stays poised on my fingertip.

They know I’m back in the city. Lord Repha’im knows I’m coming. That explains the magical traps twisting in the air above his walls, keeping me from simply climbing over them. And if this kid knows about me…

“You work for him,” I say, taking the ball in hand. “That’s why you’re out here at this hour. You’re a lookout.”

~Ah. This makes things more complicated.~

I thought by showing myself, I might scare him away, that I could give myself an excuse to spare him. But as a lookout, he’s too dangerous for that, isn’t he?

He gulps again, but then his eyes dart greedily back to his ball. He should be running away right now, but I have his treasure, and he can’t bear to leave it behind. His life, for a stupid ball.

“Kid, what do you call an innocent who helps bad people, even if only a little? What do you call an innocent who gets other innocent people killed?”

He doesn’t answer. And still doesn’t run.

~I have a better question. What do you call that innocent, Kylar?~

Today? Today I call him an acceptable loss.

The lines get blurry. But that’s what this work is. It’s why I hate it, almost as much as I love it.

“They’ve given you some sort of signal,” I say. “A flare or something, if you see me? I’ll be straight with you. You give them that signal, you die.”

He blanches, but his eyes flick to his ball again. His treasure.

If I have to kill him, the world won’t be losing one of its great minds.

“Kid, I have so much power that it scares me. Power so big it needs bounds. I could become worse than the men I’ve killed. Maybe I already have. But I’m trying here. Trying to be good, you understand? So I’ve been working on some rules for myself. Trying them out, anyway. Here’s one: Never let anyone see my face, or they have to die.”

If I let him walk, he’ll think my attention has shifted away from him and onto infiltrating the estate. Then he might come back and warn them. But if he runs away, I can draw my blade and chase. He’ll have no idea how long I keep coming after him. He probably won’t stop running until noon.

I pull my mask off. “What do you think?” I say.

He squeaks but doesn’t break. Tough kid. Or maybe just that dumb.

“I know what it’s like, kid, working for these kinds of people. I’ve been there. Here, actually. I grew up not far from here, in a part of the Warrens that makes this place look soft. The streets don’t give most kids a chance. I know that. Hate it. So with me everyone gets a chance. One. One chance. Then my judgment is final. I offer mercy first, if I can, then I bring justice, ruthless and red.”

He’s not running away, not taking the out I’m trying to offer him. Which means I’m going to have to send another body bobbing white down the sour sludge-brown river.

Unless…

A glimmer of it comes to me. My third way. Maybe.

I turn and kick the ball at the goal. I narrowly miss. Dammit. I’m not my master yet. But it does bounce back to the kid, who scoops up his little treasure convulsively.

Facing the wall and the brightening sky, as I put my mask back on against the stench of the river and slums, I ask quietly, “So tell me, what do you choose?”

There’s no response but the quiet scritch of fleeing feet on cobblestones. The kid is gone. Finally.

I draw blades, snarl, and run after him. He throws a look back as he rounds a corner, his face blanched, eyes wide, stumbling on trash spilling out of an alley. With him in full flight, I stow my weapons, pull the shadows about me, and pursue him on the silent feet of a nightmare.

I have a poison. Knocks out a grown man. I could use it on the kid, scaling the dose down for his weight. But there’s a chance it’ll kill him. You just can’t tell.

In wet work, a mistake can mean a dead kid. If you can’t deal with that, you’re in the wrong line of work.

After a couple of quick turns, the kid heads down a street parallel to the estate, and I start to think he’s wised up and is running home. Then he slips into a space between a dilapidated shop and the compound’s pristine wall. There, amid rotting wood and crumbling mortar, he disappears.

My chest tightens.

I find the hole only by the sound of his trousers scuffing along the ground as he crawls. I follow.

The tunnel stinks of dander and cat piss. Unpleasant as it is, it’s a good sign. If it were clean, I’d know adults had built and maintained it. Nonetheless, here I take it slow. Not from claustrophobia. Tight spaces only terrify if they also make you feel powerless, and when I was little, tight spaces kept me safe from the older kids. Nor does a fear of the oppressive dark slow me. Since I bonded the black ka’kari, darkness welcomes my eyes.

No, here is where I’d set the real trap, if I were hunting me.

The big trap I’m currently avoiding by entering the estate this way is directly in and above the walls of the compound. Hanging invisible in the air is some kind of magical snare that appears to be the work of at least three different magi. Two of them were subtle. The third is a fire mage.

Fire mages don’t tend to be good at subtle.

I don’t know what the invisible hooks and bars and switches above the walls do—I’m no mage myself—but I know when you see a bear trap, you don’t test it by sticking your foot in.

The ball, I realize.

There was magic on the ball, wasn’t there? I ask the ka’kari. Why didn’t you tell me?

~You’re a big boy now, Kylar. I’m not going to spell everything out for you.~

That’s what was strange about the ball, not only that it was too expensive for a street kid—the ball itself was the lookout’s warning flare. He was probably supposed to throw it over the wall if he saw me.

I push through the tight tunnel as fast as I dare. Then I pause at its exit in the lee of a large rock that leans against an outbuilding, the hole itself overgrown with long grasses. The exit’s too small for an adult to pass. Even the kid had barely made it through.

That’s the good news. It means this isn’t the manor’s emergency exit. It means Lord Repha’im may not know it exists.

The bad news is that the estate’s dogs aren’t ignorant about this hole, and every last one of them seems to have used this corner to mark its territory and empty its bowels.

I hear a distant pounding on a door, and the kid’s voice raised, shouting.

I need to hurry.

I scrape at the hard earth with my bare hands, widening the exit. The ka’kari could help me with this, but it doesn’t, and I don’t beg it to. The ka’kari’s magic could also blunt the smell of the fresh dog crap the kid stepped in and smeared everywhere as he scrambled out of the tunnel—but again, it doesn’t.

Why is it always sewers and bare rock walls with a thousand-pace drop in this line of work? Why don’t my jobs take me on pleasure cruises with beautiful women and expensive alcohol and chamber music?

I make it out and step gingerly past all the dog excrement. It doesn’t matter if your own body doesn’t have any scent—as mine doesn’t—if you reek of what you stepped in. My master always told me that it’s the little things that’ll get you killed.

He worried about the big things, too. And the medium things. And half the time, a bunch of things I’m pretty sure were imaginary.

The bitter business is hell for paranoia.

I flit from shadow to shadow, getting away from the tunnel entrance. I consider climbing to the roof of a low outbuilding but instead stay on the ground to avoid silhouetting myself, quickly pulling the unstrung bow from my pack. I brace the lower limb of the bow on the ground, set the string in its lower notch, step through, bend the bow, and set the upper string. I check my arrows by feel, then nock a swallowtail broadhead.

The boy’s not a difficult target. He’s twenty paces away, and he’s left off pounding on the door as yelling mercenaries charge toward him with their weapons drawn. His precious ball awkwardly tucked under one elbow, he raises his hands in surrender.

The time is now, before they surround him. The reason I chose a broad-edged swallowtail head on this arrow is because if you shoot someone in the torso, the arrow itself points back toward your location.

My intended shot is more difficult by far. If I clip his scrawny neck with the fat swallowtail head, the arrow will keep flying, disappearing into the darkness. There will be the whisper of an arrow in flight, the alarming spray of arterial blood, and he’ll go down, silenced before he can make my work too difficult, with little hint what direction his death came from.

I told him the price. I gave him the choice. He chose death, not me.

I draw the string to my lips. There’s no wind. Frozen with fear of the approaching mercenaries, the boy’s holding very still. I’ve got this.

I don’t know if you’ve ever shot a recurve bow, but they’re not made to be held fully drawn. Yet I hold.

He’s a child.

A child protecting a monster. An acceptable loss.

I think of Count Drake. I’m recording this for him, narrating everything to the ka’kari. He’d never have asked me to do this job. He’d tell me I’m imperiling my soul. He’d ask if I was certain I’m doing this for justice.

I am.

But how can I look him in the eye and tell him I killed a child?

I can say kids die in wars, that our war’s not really over yet, that it can’t be over until justice is done.

A huge brute of a guard is moving forward. He’ll obscure my shot in about two heartbeats.

One.

I slowly release the tension on the arrow. Lower the bow unshot. Cursing silently, I unstring it, tuck it away.

The door opens, and a man in fine clothes comes out. I lose sight of him as I start moving once more. I hear only snippets of the conversation, questions flying back and forth. I catch glimpses of wild gesticulations as the man in charge interrogates the others.

No, the guards hadn’t seen the agreed-upon alarm, so what’s the problem?

No, they don’t know the kid, but they’re new, they don’t know plenty of people here.

Then, as I come close enough to hear his words clearly, the tenor of the leader’s voice changes. With one hand, he’s got the kid by the front of his tunic; the other hand is holding the ball. “Are you telling me the Night Angel talked to you? And you didn’t give us the signal?!”

The guards exchange glances, some filled with disbelief, others with sudden fear.

As the man drops the kid, I see red sigils on the man’s bare scalp lighting up.

Ah, a red mage. Probably the same one whose work I’d seen above the compound’s walls.

“I didn’t want to lose my ball,” the kid says plaintively.

With a roar, the mage hurls the kid’s ball over the wall and into the slums beyond.

As the ball flies through the weaves above the walls, a deep red light pulses over the whole of the compound. Tendrils of red light burn as if along oil trails to every window and door of the mansion, which then pulse with the same red. The snick of mundane locks slapping shut joins the hum of magics activating, sealing the entire estate.

“My ball!” the kid yells.

Up in the air there’s a blur of blue magics and a meaty crunch. The nearest guards flinch, thinking it’s an attack. Everyone turns to see a bat drop to the ground in several bloody pieces, its predawn hunt cut short.

The red mage snarls at the kid, “You didn’t come over the wall. And you didn’t come through the gate. How’d you get in?”

“I, I—”

“Never mind.” The red mage abruptly turns to search the darkness. “You little fool, you led him right inside. The Night Angel’s already here.”

Chapter Two: The Book of the Dead

Pulling her eyes away from the page, Vi slouched in her chair, measuring her breaths so as not to betray the manic smithy in her chest. The handwriting certainly looked like Kylar’s, but having been raised among the Cenarian Sa’kagé, Vi knew a forgery was always possible. She wasn’t an expert. She could be fooled. And the more important the document, the more skeptical you should be.

The Sisters were treating this book as if it were very, very important.

They’d summoned her from her lessons. She’d been expecting that. Her friend Gwaen wished her luck with a tense smile. Vi knew she was going to be punished sooner or later, but the stern, silent Sister hadn’t taken her to stand before some tribunal. Instead, she’d led her to this cozy library with half a dozen scarred black walnut study tables and a few hundred tomes and scrolls, high in the White Seraph. Refusing to answer any of Vi’s questions, she’d seated Viridiana at a table with a single unimpressive codex on it. Common goat leather from the look of it, worn, dyed black. It was blind tooled with a few paltry geometric designs rather than embossed with gold, the edges not gilt or gauffered. And yet it rested here on a platform with gold contact points under a gold-framed glass dome.

Chanting some spell below Vi’s hearing, the Sister had pulled a lever to one side of the dome. Air hissed and a violet pulse shimmered inside it. The Sister carefully lifted off the dome.

“The book stays in this library. So do you. Don’t touch it with magic. All you do is read.” Then the Sister had left.

The book didn’t look worthy of precautions. It looked like a traveling merchant’s account book or diary, sized to fit in a large pocket and plain so as not to tempt thieves. Vi’d opened it with some trepidation, but there had been no explosion of magics.

Nor had there been so much as an inscription to say who it belonged to or what it was. She’d read a few paragraphs before she realized why the handwriting looked familiar. Then she’d become immediately skeptical. A journal? Kylar?

But as she’d read on, her doubts had faded. It was definitely Kylar’s voice through the text. She recognized his way of speaking as clearly as if she were seeing his face. But what was this book? How had the Sisterhood gotten it?

Attempting to mimic the detached interest of her tutors, she looked at one of her least favorite people in the world, the Special Problems and Tactics Team leader Sister Ayayah Meganah. “What is this supposed to be?”

“So you can read it?” the Sister asked, her chin up, her tone suggesting Vi were something repulsive.

“Of course I can!” Vi snapped. “You think I can’t read? You think I’ve been spending all these hours in the library since we got back just to see how long it takes the chairs to flatten my a—my butt?” So much for calm.

She closed her eyes. In her old life, she would have used a lot more profanity and at least a few insults, but Sister Ayayah didn’t seem disposed to praise her.

Dripping condescension like bloodrot venom from her white teeth, her old team leader said, “Not ‘can you read,’ little sister…”

Before she’d come to the Chantry, Viridiana had never appreciated how many ways one could be called ‘little sister.’ Her teachers had explained that the term was intended to be a friendly reminder for full Sisters to be generous with the shortcomings of the less-experienced women training here.

From the sinewy older woman, it had not been anything so kind for a while. Not to Vi. Not since Castle Stormfast, and even less since they’d returned from the debacle on the storm ship. Slowly, as if Vi were stupid, the Sister said, “I asked, ‘Can you read it?’ Watch.”

Sister Ayayah kept her dark hair trimmed close to her skull and wore large hoops in her ears, but she moved with such stately deliberation that her earrings didn’t bob and swing when she moved. She might as well have been an idol of hungry Oyuna carved of ebon wood.

With irritating grace, the Sister glided toward Viridiana’s table, where the solid little tome lay open on a table in the tiny library high in the Chantry.

Vi had wondered why the Sister had stood so far away as Vi had read the first pages. Now she saw why. As the Sister came closer, the words on the page scrambled.

Vi couldn’t even tell if the letters still made actual words. But Sister Ayayah’s tightening lips made her guess they didn’t. “What…what is this?” Vi asked quietly, her rancor forgotten.

“I assume even you aren’t so stupid as to be asking whether it’s a magical book. So I assume, little sister, that you’re asking, ‘What is this magical book I’m reading? Why does it let me read it, but not my betters?’ And, in contradistinction to your first question, that is a very good one indeed.”

Vi snapped her mouth shut. She’d taken greater abuse in her former life, but Sister Ayayah had figured out early that being called stupid cut Vi deeper than other attacks. The Sister delighted to stab at that place, claiming always that it was for Viridiana’s own good, that she was helping Vi build up mental scar tissue on a soft spot.

“This book,” Sister Ayayah said, clipping her words, “is offal. It’s trash. It probably has nothing to do with Kylar at all. He certainly didn’t have the expertise to craft such magic. But now, I am happy to say, this book will wreck your career as it has nearly wrecked mine.”

“What?”

Sister Ayayah went on as if Vi hadn’t spoken. “Because for some reason, despite or because of your gormless lack of sophistication, this book allows you to read it and so far as we can tell no one else. Thus, it falls to me to let you know that the Council for Peace is giving you three days to read it all, finding whatever clues you can, and then to make a report thereon.”

It felt like the bad old days, when the twist who’d been her master would sometimes start a training session by punching Vi in the nose, then attack ferociously, making her defend herself while dazed, her eyes streaming blinding tears and her nose fountaining blood.

“Why is the war council meeting?” Vi managed. “And clues? Clues to what?”

“We need to find—pardon me. You…” Sister Ayayah smiled cruelly, as if in having failed a thankless task, she was now discovering the joys of handing it to someone else. “You need to figure out where Kylar’s body is.”

“From this book? But you said you don’t even know what’s in it, so how do we know that it will—”

“From the book. Yes. Don’t make me repeat myself. It makes you sound stupider than usual.”

Breathe. Slowly.

Blinking, gaze averted, it took Vi only one breath to master herself.

“But…why? Why do we care? Kylar didn’t exactly make many friends here. There’s no way the Council cares enough to send an expedition back to Alitaera merely to give him a proper burial. Not with how we left things, certainly.”

The Sister’s mouth thinned. “You used to be an assassin. Isn’t it obvious? When one hears that someone as powerful as Kylar Stern is dead, it always pays to see the body yourself.”

“There’s not going to be a body! I already told you. There’s no way he made it to—”

“We have reason to believe he did. At least a short ways.”

“But, but I thought the Seer’s magic had already confirmed he was dead. Is dead.”

With Kylar, there was a yawning gap between those two phrases, but Vi hoped Sister Ayayah had missed it.

Ayayah Meganah suddenly broke eye contact. “Fine. He carried something, allegedly an artifact with potent magics. We have reason to believe he kept it on himself secretly at all times. Did you know about this?”

“No. So you want the artifact. You don’t actually care about his body.”

Vi could see it was true, but Sister Ayayah wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. “But you care, don’t you?” the Sister shot back. “You can tell the others whatever you want, and maybe they’ll believe you. But I saw how you looked at him.”

This time, for Vi to find the flat, expressionless face of Sisterly hatred was no effort at all. “If I find him, will I be allowed to bury him?”

“Oh, little Viridiana. You’ve seen the Sisters arriving from all over the world. A full Convocation has been called to discuss the Alitaeran mess. We’ll vote what to do in three days. As your superior, it will be my strong recommendation that you not be allowed to go on that or any other expedition, not for years. So your job begins and ends with your ass flat in that chair. Given your disastrous performance at the storm ship, if you fail us in this, there will be consequences for your position in this Sisterhood. You have three days, Viridiana,” Sister Ayayah said, smiling unpleasantly. “And today counts as day one.”

DAY ONE

Chapter Three: Outracing an Amnesty

I’m clinging to the side of Lord Repha’im’s highest tower under a bank of barred windows, waiting for a guard to move.

I’ve already botched the job. I should’ve abandoned it the instant the words ‘Night Angel’ came out of that kid’s mouth. Definitely as soon as he called me Kylar Stern. There’s no good reason I can’t wait and take up the job in a month, or six months, or two years.

Well, no good reason other than the high king’s decree.

The black ka’kari is covering my skin and blinding any magic-users to my presence. It’s told me I can choose invisibility to mundane sight or invisibility to magical sight, but not both at the same time. Then again, the ka’kari may have lied to make my life harder.

~Me? Lie?~

Given the mages here, I made my choice. So now I’m pressing myself into dark corners, glancing periodically at the guard inside the window and the sky.

The rosy fingers of dawn are scratching the horizon’s back even now.

If I said I was here killing someone for my friend the high king, you’d think you know what I mean. But it’s more complicated than that. Harder. I’m hoping to kill someone without his orders, maybe even against his orders, and yet keep the king my friend.

If I leave only the one monster inside this building dead, Logan might forgive me. If I butcher a dozen men—regardless of how much they deserve it—he’ll be done with me. In fact, he’d probably send his own people to arrest me, and then he’d execute me.

Would he order the execution of his best friend?

Let’s just say I have good reason to believe he would.

I can still abort the job. In some ways, I have all the time in the world.

Terrible people always have lots of enemies, and no one can live on high alert forever. Deaders get impatient. They hole up for a while, but eventually they get bored, decide the danger has passed, and come back out.

That is when my master kills them. It’s the smart approach. It’s what I should do.

But if I can finish this tonight, the high king might still forgive me. If I do it tonight, it’ll still be plausible that I hadn’t heard about his big amnesty. I did outrun the messengers to get here first. But the heralds will be announcing the amnesty first thing in the morning.

But that’s not the real reason I’m here, and we both know it, huh, Count Drake?

Truth is, I can’t let it go. It’s too late to save my foster sisters. But it’s not too late for vengeance.

Justice, I mean.

I rub my eyes with one hand. I haven’t slept well in the months since the last battle at Black Barrow, and not at all in the last day or so. That’s not good. My Talent can’t compensate for slow reflexes and dulled judgment.

Finally, the guard walks away. I look at the bars on the window. The ka’kari can devour small slices of steel to cut through the bars, but it’s full of power already. It would be like trying to fill an oil lamp with a full reservoir. More oil will only splash outside the lamp, which isn’t wise when you’re dealing with fire. In the same way, cutting the bars with the ka’kari now will be like lighting a flare up here in both the magical and the visible spectrums.

I shoot a glance down to the courtyard. A mage, this one helpfully dressed in blue robes, is patrolling there. I can use magic for internal things like strengthening my muscles for a leap without being seen, but anything external I do will be like waving a torch in the darkness. He might not see it if I’m fast enough. If I time it to when he turns away…

No, not worth the risk. Some other pair of eyes might see me.

I pull myself up to peek through the window. The guard is still walking away, heading to the opposite window to join another man there. If the other one turns to greet him while I climb past the window, I’m in it deep.

There are simply too many eyes that might be turned toward me, and too many ways for me to reveal myself through plain bad luck.

Gotta risk it. Here we go.

I feel the tingle of the ka’kari at my fingertips as it soaks up moisture and oils to help my grip. As I said, very helpful when it wants to be.

Decorated corbels support the overhanging flat roof of the tower above me. No magic, plus windows, plus the overhang mean that my best bet is going to be a quick series of dynamic movements. Once more I’m thankful for the years I spent with no Talent. In trying to keep up with my master, I had to learn good climbing technique.

However, I also fell to the ends of lots of ropes in those years—and I never tried anything this stupid. And this time I’ve got no rope to catch me.

I visualize the moves quickly: a quick run up the wall, leap out from the wall with a half-twist, snag the gargoyle below the overhang, spin around it to backflip onto the roof.

No problem, right? I got this.

I am gonna die.

Peeking inside, I see one of the guards hike his thumb toward my window. The other glances over, nods. One of them’s gonna come this way any second.

Now!

I mantle the windowsill with a Talent-assisted heave and run my hands up the bars outside the windows like they’re a ladder. My feet follow, racing up the bars. I twist to face away from the wall and leap up and out into space.

For a brief instant, my body twists, disconnected, touching only air. Then my hands slap onto the bulbous round stone eyes of the gargoyle carved on the corbels above me. I spin around it like an acrobat spins his body around a bar to throw me back in toward the building.

But as I pull myself, hard, one of the stone eyes tears away in my hand, throwing my trajectory off.

My body is heading up, but not quite high enough and not far enough back in onto the rooftop.

As I complete my flip, my knees hit stone instead of my feet, barely on the edge of the roof. Too soon, my momentum fades and my body reaches that sickening moment at the apogee of a jump where you stop rising.

My center of mass is still off the edge of the roof.

I throw my hands back to snag the crenels on either side of the gap, but they’re too far apart. There’s no way I’m not falling.

But I stab my legs out to either side, doing the splits, and catch a crenel with one foot—and land a great deal of my weight directly on my groin.

Then, with nothing to grab, I slip off.

I only keep from falling by snagging the edge of the roof with one hand and one extended foot tucked into the gargoyle’s open mouth, where it barely protrudes beyond the overhang.

I can barely move for several long moments, struggling even to breathe. There’s something mystical about testicular pain. But you can be trained to endure it and still do what you must.

You want to guess how my master trained me to ignore that kind of pain?

Go ahead and guess, because I’m not going to talk about it.

My Talent makes clinging to a cold, gritty wall with one tenuous handhold and on tiptoe not exactly easy, but possible. I brace myself, then hop from my one foot to swing my other hand up to the edge. From there, it’s a simple pull up, so long as the edge of the tower holds.

It does. I flop onto the rooftop and roll away from the edge, safe at last. Then I finally roll onto my side and curl into a fetal position like a grown man ought to.

~What good luck!~

“Good?” I croak out.

~The eye you tore off the gargoyle fell into the bushes, and the guard happened to be far enough away not to hear it.~

I can only groan. Lucky me.

I’ve barely stood up and dusted my hands and tunic clean when I hear a voice below, shouting, “Stern! Kylar Stern, I know you’re here!”

Aware that a crossbow bolt or a blast of magic may be waiting for me to pop my head out into view, I approach the edge carefully, but the speaker isn’t lying in ambush. He’s standing under a covered patio almost directly below me. It can only be Lord Repha’im himself. He must be packed between bodyguards who can’t be happy he came outside—not to mention mages, too, because I can see little balls of variously colored light spinning out from the patio, dipping into shadows, hunting me.

Next he’s going to tell me to come out and fight him like a man.

“Stern!” he shouts again. Then his voice goes quieter, though I can still hear it without straining. He’s got one of those voices that carry. “You think you know how this ends. You’re wrong.”

The glowing balls zoom around one last time and then disappear. I hear the door bang shut and the loud scrapings of bars magical and mundane being thrown home.

I’m wrong, huh? I think, pooling the black ka’kari into my hand. Guess we’ll find out about that.

I stand, and with the whole of the tower itself safely blocking the ka’kari’s magic from the view of those below, I simply cut through the lock on the door.

I take a moment to gather my will for the ugliness that’s to come.

The responsibility is mine alone. My guilt is immeasurable, inescapable, unspeakable—but it’s not mine alone. You and your family welcomed me into your home as a son, Count Drake. It’s my fault my sister is dead. But I didn’t throw her from that balcony. I didn’t deface her body. I can’t make myself pay for what happened, but tonight someone will.

I wrap dampening weaves of air around the hinges to cover their squeaking and slip inside to do some killing.

Chapter Four: A Convenient Monster

Seems a waste to climb all the way to the top of the highest tower in a place only to descend all the way to the heavily guarded cellar, doesn’t it? Especially when that tower has numerous choke points that can easily be held by any disciplined guards, much less mages.

In this tower, Lord Repha’im has teams of guards every few floors. He has such teams guarding every approach to his inner sanctum. At least five of the teams consist of a guard partnered with a mage.

That’s a lot of mages for some new lord from nowhere. And all of them, guards and mages alike, are now on high alert. It’s almost as if, in addition to being wealthy, the man is smart and careful and doesn’t want to die.

That’s fine, though. Lord Repha’im’s defenses aren’t going to be any problem. I trained as a wetboy. So that means I’m a super assassin who can walk through walls, kill whoever I want, and disappear before the body hits the ground, right?

Oh, that’s right. You used to hire wetboys, back before you took me in, didn’t you, Count Drake? Back before you changed.

There are two doors off the narrow central stair serving the apartments at the highest level of the tower: a servants’ entrance, and a fancier door for the lord or his guests. I hesitate here in the darkness, considering how sound will carry down the spiraling stone staircase.

I don’t know much about Lord Repha’im, but I know a lot about Cenaria. I grew up in the slums, and its courts are as vicious and not much cleaner. No one comes to Cenaria unless they’re willing to get dirty. Certainly no one comes here and gets suddenly wealthy unless they’re very good at being very bad.

So call me a cynic, but I’m betting Lord Repha’im has a guilty conscience.

Not that he has a conscience, but you know what I mean.

The level below me is some kind of parlor, divided into two sides by tall bookshelves, with large windows on every side to take advantage of the views of the city. On my climb, I already saw that there’s a guard and a mage inside, but what I hadn’t seen was that rather than the spiral stair continuing through this level, instead the stair enters at one side, and then a new stairway begins on the opposite side of the room.

It’s an annoying level of paranoia. If your enemies have taken your castle except for the highest room of your tower, you’ve already lost. But, inconveniences aside, it means I’m probably right.

The reason I didn’t kill the kid as soon as he showed me the way in isn’t because I’m nice. It’s because I’m a cynic. I didn’t have time to scout this job properly, so I made some guesses: dirty noble, guilty conscience, fearful, careful, egotist?

Add them up and I figure this noble’s got some nigh-impregnable safe room for himself.

But you see, that’s not a problem. It’s a solution.

Assassin breaks into a heavily fortified estate? Everyone rallies to the boss, because everyone assumes the assassin has come to kill the boss.

In this case, everyone’s wrong.

The alarm has called almost all the guards to positions where they can defend a man who doesn’t concern me.

Lord Repha’im probably deserves killing. I don’t know. I’m not here for him. I’m here to kill one of his guests. One who I believe is in this room.

If Repha’im is a good man, he’ll have brought his guests with him into his safe room. If he’s a bad man, he’ll have left them to fend for themselves. Maybe with a single guard or two—like the two men in the parlor.

This is the real gamble, because I don’t know Repha’im. My master would never have gambled in such a way. But me? Now? I have to.

That there are still guards here tells me I’m probably right. That they haven’t been called away suggests there’s something valuable in the apartments at the top of the stairs. Or, I hope, someone.

Breaking into the apartment may be noisy. What I’ll do inside definitely will be, so I have to take care of these men first.

And not kill them. No massacres, for Logan’s sake. My arm trembles, and I blink against the sudden reminder of my exhaustion.

I can hear the men talking, though I can’t make out any of the words. It means they’re about to switch stations, though I’ve lost track of how long it’s been since I climbed past the window. My master Durzo would know exactly which one he’d see next. He also would have known exactly what kind of trigger they had to set off their own alarms—which could be as simple as mundane whistles, or as difficult as magical beacons triggered any of a dozen ways, some of them very difficult to stop.

This job is looking more and more like a tremendous mistake.

Even now I can call it off.

But Trudana Jadwin is right here. Her treason doesn’t concern me as much as the fact that she assisted those who murdered my foster sister Magdalyn and used her body for what she calls art: turning her body into a perfectly lifelike statue made of undecaying flesh and put on display for the vulturous titillation of others.

If I leave, the duchess gets away with all of it. Her crimes will be pardoned under High King Logan’s postwar amnesty. She’s been in hiding since the last battle, but after today, she’ll walk out of this tower and rejoin society. Not at the bottom, either; she’ll jump back in near the top.

I won’t allow it. You understand, don’t you, Count Drake? The thought of you going to court and seeing her laugh and drink wine with her friends? She’s the kind who would seek you out, too, who would gloat, knowing you’ve sworn yourself to a life of nonviolence.

I understand why you got out, but the world needs men who will walk the werewolf night, who will wade through blood to stop what’s wrong. Men like me.

I remove my weapons belt and pack and stash them out of sight up the stairs. I open two tins; first I wipe an insulating layer of grease on my fingers, then scoop up two daubs of my knockout poison. I will the ka’kari to sink back into my skin, leaving me naked.

Then I hesitate in the shadows of the staircase. This seemed like a much better idea last night.

I see that the man on my side of the parlor is the mage, and I call on the ka’kari to hide my Talent from his sight, just in case.

“Psst,” I say.

He’s standing against the windows, looking out at the rising dawn coming up over the city. He is much bigger than I’d realized. I’m going to have to give him both doses.

How’d I miss that?

“Psst,” I say again, louder. My shoulders are hunched, and I have my hands crossed to cover my nudity, everything about me speaking vulnerability.

He turns. “What the—”

I wave him over with one hand, embarrassed.

“Dannil?” he says, but not loud. Must be the other guard’s name.

I shake my head, as if mortified at being seen naked, pleading.

He walks toward me. “What are you doing here?” he asks, not quietly.

“Shh, please,” I say. “I’ll lose my job if my master finds me out. I’ve been trying to get out of here since the alarm went off.”

“What are you doing here?” he says again, eyes narrowing. He’s got a delicate glass bauble in his right hand, with his big thumb poised on it.

“I was…with…you know, last night.” I jerk my head toward the stairs. Trudana Jadwin is famous for her prodigious sexual appetite and her preference for men about half her age—which is to say my age. I say, “When the alarm hit, she kicked me out of her chambers! And she won’t let me back in. My clothes are in there!”

He snorts. I see the tension go out of him. He’s barely holding back a laugh.

“Please!” I whisper. He’s wearing gloves. There’s very little skin exposed for me to use the contact poison. “You’ve gotta help me. Do you have any idea the degrading things she made me do last night—and did to me? I’ll be spending the rest of the week in a bathtub trying to scrub away the…ugh. If I lose my job on top of that? Please, sirrah.” I fall on my knees in front of him and reach up to take his hand in both of my own. I smear the contact poison around the front and back of his wrist, then hold his hand in supplication with both of mine to confuse the touch.

It’s an old pickpocket’s trick. A lone touch is easily felt, but a brief light touch can be overwhelmed in the senses by a firmer, broader touch right before or after it.

“Dannil!” he says louder, amused. “Come see this!”

“Oh, come on!” I whine, still on my knees. “Really?”

He pulls his hand away from me with distaste and tucks away the glass alarm trigger. “You should know better than to consort with your betters, boy.”

Then he blinks.

“What is it?” I hear the guard on the other side of the wall ask.

The big mage blinks again, then totters.

I’m behind him before he notices, striking the back of both of his knees with my fists.

He folds into my waiting arms, and I wrap him in a sleeper hold to ensure his silence. He goes limp, and I release him immediately. Can’t cut off the blood flow to the head for long; that risks death, and besides, I want the knockout poison in his brain.

I vault over a low bookcase as the guard is coming around the corner.

I imagine the last thing he was expecting was a naked man leaping into the air, knocking his hands wide, my right leg going over his shoulder, left leg stabbing below his right armpit, missing my target. But I pull his head down and with my full weight bearing him down, we fall together. I slap a hand down to break my fall, and he drops on all fours on top of me. He manages to stand as my legs snake around him, hoping to lift me and then slam me down to the ground. But I block his heel from stepping back as he tries to balance our combined weight.

Tripping, he falls onto his butt even as my legs complete the triangle around his head. And that’s that.

From him spotting me, to fighting me, to lying unconscious took less than a ten count. It never even occurred to him to use his most dangerous weapon: his voice.

I release him quickly. Again, it’s too easy to kill a man without intending to. I grab his weapons and find his alarm trigger tucked in a pocket. Then I bring the ka’kari to my skin to sheathe me as the Night Angel once more. There’s no telling how long a man who’s been choked out will stay unconscious.

In this case, it’s not nearly long enough. Instead of the flutter of eyelids signaling him drifting back into consciousness, his eyes open fully and suddenly.

I don’t intend it. Don’t want it, but perhaps the proximity of our faces, perhaps the fear in his eyes, something triggers my powers: the Night Angel—whatever the hell it is, whatever the hell I am now—can sometimes see a person’s crimes in their eyes, like an indelible stain writ directly on their soul, impossible for anyone else to see, impossible for me to miss.

As fast as I can, I break eye contact. Without intending to, I’ve crossed the space between us, pinned him with a knee, wrenched his head back with one hand and drawn a blade with the other—poised for a killing blow; jaw clenched, teeth bared, the Night Angel mask sheathing my face, smoke leaking from eyes of blue flame, burning condemnation.

My averted eyes take in his livery. Somehow, I’d missed it before now.

These men aren’t wearing the Repha’im coat of arms, they wear Jadwin livery. This man was involved in kidnapping Mags and…and I don’t know what else. I’d looked away as soon as I saw the beating he gave her.

I can’t kill this man.

I can’t not.

“Magdalyn Drake,” I growl at the man beneath me. My Night Angel mask is made of the same black ka’kari skin as the rest of my outfit, but instead of hewing closely to my own features as the rest does, the face is a sinister blank of judgment. Mouth minimized to a hint of a scowl, eyes hooded, sometimes dancing with an illusory blue glow for curious eyes—but now, by reflex, flaring to red fires, illusory smoke curling up as from the hellfire within waiting for the condemned.

“I never laid a hand on her!” he says.

It’s a lie, though I can tell even as he says it that he doesn’t realize that. Has he forgotten beating her?

My powers do this to me sometimes, presenting me with seemingly contradictory information. I guess by ‘never laid a hand on her’ he means that he never raped her. But at the same time, in his eyes I saw a flash of him grabbing her breast, twisting it, and laughing at her pain and terror as she cried out, terrified what he’d do next. But he’d never raped her. He didn’t have that kind of hunger—

I can’t do this. I can’t judge him. Not here. Not now. I can’t risk digging too deeply. I know that if I see certain kinds of guilt, I’m going to kill him regardless, consequences be damned.

“Hell’s wrong with your eyes?” he asks, squirming beneath me.

I look up, meeting his.

He loves intimidating, loves hurting. The only music that moves him is the percussion of blows on flesh, the sounds of pain pitching higher; the averted eyes of the humiliated stirs him like coy teasing, and tears are better than—

I force myself to stare at his throat instead of his eyes. I shudder, my limbs tensing as my desire to end this thing crescendos.

He’s not afraid of me in the least, but it would be wrong to think him courageous. I see fear in my work, know it well. As everything else can break or go wrong in this world, so can that. Some people don’t understand fear, don’t feel it. You’d think that’s a gift. It’s not. In its proper place, fear is a gift. Fear is evidence of a soul, evidence that a person values something. A man like this’ll lie to your face—not because he’s cunning, but because he’s unafraid of you catching the lie. He either doesn’t understand consequences or is unable to care about them.

Now that I know what I’m dealing with, I go cold. “Can you write?” I ask, cutting his sleeve open from wrist to shoulder with my thin, sharp blade.

“Can I what?” he asks, looking bewildered as I cut the sleeve free.

“Write. Your letters, man. Do you have your letters?”

“Naw, I don’t write. I look like some smooth-nut book sniffer a’ you?”

“Good,” I say. “Then you get to live.” I wad up the sleeve.

“I get a’ what?”

“You won’t be able to tell them any more about me than they already know.”

“What?”

I sheathe my delicate knife and draw his. It’s got a wide, heavy blade.

“You ain’t got the belly to kill me,” he says. “Or you already woulda. You think you’re gonna scare me silent?”

I shake my head and avert my gaze yet again. Perhaps he takes it as a loss of nerve.

“What’s going to stop me from telling them everything, huh?” he demands.

“Not this,” I say.

With a rapidity he isn’t expecting, I seize one of his hands, pull on it to extend the sinews, and slash the hand free of his wrist with the heavy blade.

By the time he gasps, I’m ready with his own wadded-up sleeve to gag him and muffle his cry—and then the scream that follows it as the ka’kari burns red with power and cauterizes his stump to keep him from bleeding out. It smells like—well, you don’t need that detail rattling around in your head.

“You’ve been a man who preys on the weak,” I say, “so I sentence you to weakness. You will survive only by the compassion of others, or not at all. But compassionate people are vulnerable people, and I’ll not loose you as a wolf among sheep, so I’m going to take away your ability to hurt anyone.”

All right, I’ve come back later. I realized that before I go on, we should probably talk about our deal.

Yes, yours and mine, listener or reader or whatever you are. Turns out this isn’t going to be the private tale for Count Drake’s ears only as I’d planned, so I need you to understand a couple things.

On the few occasions I’ve offered to tell any part of my story, people always tell me they want to hear it all.

They never do. Not really. You don’t, either.

Hey, I get it: You listen to a hired killer tell stories, you expect to hear hired-killer stories, right? Maybe you start by asking the question that anyone who’s ever killed just adores: ‘How does it feel to kill a man?’

As if killing a man always feels the same. As if killing a man always evokes any feeling at all.

But I understand, maybe you honestly believe you’re different, you can handle it, you do want to hear everything.

Well, I don’t trust you. You’ll want extra gore when my deaders are particularly bad. But when I’ve got to kill some wretch just doing his job, trying to put meat in his kids’ bellies once a week by serving a good man who serves a good man who serves a bad man that I need to kill, you’ll want a bloodless, easy death for him. Won’t you?

As if the world works that way.

If you want to feel comfortable with what I do, get the hell out. If you came here to enjoy murder vicariously, get out now and go take a good hard look in the mirror, friend.

If you’re curious about what I do, though? That I understand. I had that curiosity myself once upon a time. But I was a kid. I didn’t know better.

All that said…if you’ve got a reasonably strong stomach, you can trust me about this. I’ll tell you all you need to know to understand how I got here on this precipice, about to…do what I’m about to do.

But beyond what details are necessary for clarity? I’ll be the one deciding how much you need to hear about the awful stuff. If you don’t like that, my lord—or my lady—or whoever the hell you are, you can stop listening at any point. Or put down the codex and stop reading, if my words someday reach the page. Believe me, I’ll tell you plenty to sate your curiosity and a bit more besides, and if the violence gets to be too much—and it will—I’ll tell you when to look away.

Enough interruption. Back to Dannil and the necessary carnage.

None of the rest of my not-killing him is all that noteworthy. It’s enough to say that he quickly passes out.

Now I stare for a moment at the appendages I’ve flung about the hall like an adolescent scatters clothing around his bedchamber.

It doesn’t seem right to leave what looks like a butcher’s shop here, so I gather his eyes, hands, and the front half of each foot. (I decided he’ll need to be able to stand but never run or kick anyone.) For the life of me, though, I can’t find his tongue.

Where in the world is his bloody tongue?

I give it up—his friend the mage won’t stay unconscious forever, and if he wakes while I’m here, he’ll be much harder for me to deal with. I decide to go on to my main objective.

My gaze falls on the man’s pile o’ parts. I’d intended putting them all together to be a conscientious act: like a carpenter sweeping up the sawdust or a chef cleaning the kitchen after his work.

Unfortunately, the neat stack gives a rather different impression. I’d cauterized his wounds, but not the wounds on the detached parts. So it’s a pile of little bloody parts. And, really, I’m trying to make this not sound sick, but what does one do with loose eyeballs?

Point them out from each other, so they look wonky? That’s hardly appropriate. Point them in, so they look cross-eyed? Even worse. Both pointing left, toward his own unconscious body, as if he’s staring at himself? Away from him, so he seems ashamed? Oops, misplaced my eyeballs! How embarrassing!

I do the best I can and then cover the whole thing with his handkerchief.

Smearing the last of my knockout poison on Dannil, I leave.

Ah…blast it. Never should’ve said his name. You don’t need to remember it. He doesn’t show up again—at least, he hasn’t up until now, and I could hardly imagine a cripple hopping his way up this mountain—but me telling you his name personalized the bastard, didn’t it?

But if you feel sorry for him, don’t. I didn’t tell you half of the sick stuff I saw in his eyes.

Anyway, I’ll leave out the irrelevant details next time. Cut me some slack, I’m new to this telling-it-as-I-go business. I’ll get better with practice.

Probably.

I go to the fancy door and rap on it. “Lady Jadwin?” I say, sounding for all the world like a gentleman caller.

“Who’s there?” a woman calls out. Despite the thick wood muffling the sound, in her nasal voice I hear a quaver.

“It’s Kylar Stern. I’m here to kill you. Won’t take but a minute.”

Chapter Five: Death and the Artist

If you pay attention, people will surprise you with how dumb they are every day. But sadly, Trudana Jadwin doesn’t open the door for me.

I sigh as I unlock the door with the guard’s key. Often nobles like her are so far out of touch that they think having people to do things for them is a sign of their own importance, and Trudana Jadwin has shown herself in many instances to be the worst sort of noble—but I still have to assume she has one of those glass-bauble alarm triggers.

As the lock clicks, I hear her scream. She must now have realized there are only a few ways I could’ve gotten that key, and for her, none of those is good news.

In case she has a crossbow or a silent, armed companion in the room with her, I stand out of the direct line of fire as I turn the latch at shoulder height and push on the door.

It’s barred from inside.

I hear her laugh scornfully. “Stern?” she asks, directly on the other side of the door now. “Logan Gyre’s poor relation from the countryside? The one with the hideous clothes?”

Ah. The scream was a tease. A setup so she could mock me.

“Not a relation,” I say. “Merely a friend. A friend with a minimal sense of fashion and a maximal…”

The ka’kari puddles like iridescent black oil in my palm and slips through the crack in the door, becoming like a thin crowbar. I lever it up and down a few times and am rewarded as the wood plank that was barring the door on the other side goes crashing to the ground. “…grudge,” I finish, irritated. I thought that was going to sound a lot more menacing.

Eh, maybe I’ll fix it later.

I push the door open with a foot.

The twang of a crossbow sounds almost atop the thump of bolt into wood—not the sharper sound of iron hitting the stone of the stairwell behind me, as I’d expected.

Trudana couldn’t even shoot a target the size of an open doorway from—I poke my head around the doorframe, incredulous—seven paces?

Lady Jadwin’s backing away, the crossbow now held limply in her hands. Her eyes are wide, aghast. She isn’t trying to reload. Probably she doesn’t know how. She trips over a stool and goes crashing into one of the many easels set up around the periphery of the room. Her art clutters even this large space: Folios thick with drawings obscure every desk and stool, canvases lean four deep against every wall, and one corner is coated with marble dust and stone-carving tools.

No one else is in sight.

That could be a trap, though. I spend precious seconds making sure it’s not.

“Look what you made me do,” she says. There’s fresh fire in her voice. In falling, she’s destroyed one of her paintings. I glance around the room and guess that all of the paintings here are her creations. “How dare you!” she says, standing.

She has the hawkish beak—it’s really so much larger than a nose that Logan would call it a…what’s the word?

~Snout?~

Proboscis…I think. Anyway, she has the huge nose and the long horsey face and watery eyes that you only get with a certain deeply inbred subspecies of nobility, but sadly none of their better features.

She does, however, have excellent aesthetic sensibilities. Even the dressing gown she’s wearing at this early hour, with lavender and a seafoam green of perfectly complementary shades and with textures in a perfect counterpoint to the layers of her underclothes beneath, reeks of a rare confluence of money and good taste.

Her art is beautiful, too. I hate her for that.

I’ll admit, in my darker hours I had fantasies about how I might punish her appropriately for what she’s done. I was going to kidnap her, hide her away somewhere, and give her food only when she gave me paintings, or sculptures, or whatever moved my fancy. I’d force her to make whatever it was she hated, over and over again. Or maybe what she loved. I dreamed of spurring her to the greatest heights of Art she might climb, and then destroying what she’d made in front of her, so that she might know no one would ever see what she had done.

I was planning to experiment: destroy her art in front of her every day? Or perhaps one day a year I would destroy all she’d made in the previous year? Which would be more soul-crushing?

Such fantasies are unworthy of a professional, I know.

“I’m here for Mags Drake,” I say.

Her piggy eyes squint. “Who?”

“Magdalyn Drake. You turned her into one of your corpse statues.”

“The broken girl? You can’t be angry about that! I did astonishing work with what I was given. She’d jumped to her death! I put her back together. I gave her beauty back to the world.”

I blink. I shouldn’t be surprised. It must be all the sleepless nights catching up with me. Denial of wrongdoing? What’s next? Finger pointing?

Finally noticing the look on my face, she howls, “It wasn’t my idea! I had to do it. He made me! Said it was research. He said…”

I rub my temples. What did I think I was going to find here? Sorrow for her crimes? A bit of self-reflection? Penitence?

~Peace?~

Shut up, I tell the ka’kari.

This woman murdered a prince. In cold blood. After having been his lover for a while. She helped eliminate the royal line in Cenaria, helping guarantee that the Godking’s brutal invasion into Cenaria would find only fractured opposition. The threads of a million evils in this land pass through this woman’s murderous hands; a bit of guilt for every one of them surely stains them.

I could look at her soul and find out. My rage would blind me, perhaps. It would help me do what I came here to do. What I worked so hard to be able to do in time.

Yet suddenly I have no heart for it.

“After I kill you,” I say very quietly, “I’m going to set fire to this room. And for the rest of my life, whenever I come across your work, I’ll destroy it, regardless of the cost, regardless of the consequences. It would be better for the world had you never been born. You should’ve been strangled in the crib. But as it is? Nothing of beauty should ever be known to have come from you. And I will make it so. Your work will outlive you, but not by much. Instead you will only be remembered for your crimes.”

It’s a cruel thing for me to tell her, but she’s a cruel woman, and she deserves it. This is retribution.

It takes some time for something like what I’ve told her to sink in, though, and even longer for her to believe it.

I walk to the corner with her carvings. I can’t tell what it is yet, but something is taking rough shape from the black marble, like a child forming in the womb. I’m hoping she sees the open path to the door and runs. There’s something about seeing prey in flight that triggers the primal predatory instinct. I want her to help me do what I must.

But she doesn’t run.

“I have powerful friends,” she says. “You aren’t going to hurt me.”

See? I was right after all: If you pay attention, people will surprise you with how dumb they are every day.

Soon she’ll be telling me how I won’t get away with this.

I blow off marble dust from her stone-cutting tools.

I pick up a chisel and a hammer.

Chapter Six: The Basics of the Job

It’s getting dicey because somehow I seem to have forgotten the fundamentals.

I should’ve killed the kid. I told him I would if he alerted them. I should’ve put that arrow through his neck. They still would’ve sounded the alarms. They still would’ve been diverted as I planned, and I still could’ve done my job. Difference being that right now I wouldn’t be facing the rectal rearrangement that’s looking increasingly likely.

How many missions have I run? How good am I, really? I got in, killed my deader, and…this guy? The Night Angel himself? Yep, him. He left himself with no escape plan.

It’s like an experienced pearl diver forgetting to take a deep breath before diving.

I don’t dare try the tunnel I used to get in—I didn’t kill the kid, and I heard them asking him how he got in, so I have to assume they’ll have mages’ traps set that tunnel now. So here I am, checking every room, every outbuilding, trying to find some weak point. Yeah, that’s right. I’m not finding my exit before the job. I’m doing it after the job, when the grounds are locked down tight, crawling with mercenaries and magi looking for me. Like an amateur.

I mean, you want to know what my job consists of?

Get in. Kill. Get out.

That’s it. That’s all my job is.

If you’re a professional, you can fail repeatedly at your infiltrations and still have a career. You can almost always finish the job some other time, some other place.

You can also get access to your deader and fail at the kill itself now and again and still find work.

But the one thing that’s non-negotiable is that you can never not get out after a kill. Those who trade their lives for their target’s aren’t professionals, they’re madmen, zealots, fools, assassins.

Of everyone I know in wet work, with my experience, with my magic, with my tutelage under the greatest of us to ever live, how could I fail at this?

~On purpose?~

Ha. Not funny. That’s not who I am, and you know it. You know what it’d cost if I got killed.

~Yes I do. Have you forgotten?~

That’s not even an option for me. Failure never has been, and since I learned my immortality’s cost, it’s a thousand times worse. If I die, I come back—but someone I love dies in my place. Someone like my foster sisters.

Their deaths are on me, though I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t imprison them. I didn’t make Mags jump, but I might as well have. One of my deaths triggered hers. I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s a deep magic, a balancing of the scales: For me to live again, someone has to die.

It’s why I had to avenge them, why I had to kill Trudana Jadwin. No matter what I do, one person responsible for my sisters’ deaths—me—will walk free. I won’t let it be two. That’s my problem. This wasn’t a job. This was personal, and when you let things get personal, you press on where a professional would know to ease off. You make mistakes.

I’ll be lucky if it doesn’t get me killed.

The guards are agitated, all of them working in pairs or larger groups, keeping their backs to the walls as much as possible. The sun is rising now, and they’ve had no sign of me. Lord Repha’im is clearly wealthy and paranoid, but even he can’t afford to have dozens of magi, so eventually I make my way into the kitchens despite the guards outside it.

Though subterranean, the kitchens share a wall with the compound, and as I hoped—but, stupidly, didn’t know beforehand—there are a couple chutes here, one for wood, and one for coal. The chutes angle from the kitchens up to the street outside to make fuel deliveries easier and cleaner. Lords don’t like coal haulers traipsing through their great halls. Both chutes are locked, which won’t be a problem, but the wood chute is filled with a few cords of wood, maybe more.

The guards check the kitchens every minute or two. There’s no way I can clear out that chute without making a terrible racket, the guards raising the alarm, and then me having to kill some of them.

But with every passing minute, the odds of Trudana Jadwin’s murder being discovered ratchets higher. When they find her dead, they may well realize Lord Repha’im wasn’t my target at all, and many of those guarding him are going to come flooding through the rest of the mansion to hunt me.

The coal chute is about the same width as from my elbow to my fingertips, and it’s a coal chute: pitch black even to my sight and full of black dust to make breathing an agony. But it’s not full of coal, yet. An estate this size must take deliveries daily, though, so I can’t count on it being empty for long.

I examine the lock but have to stop as the guards’ footsteps come closer. The good thing about my tripping the alarm is that there’s no kitchen staff about. Doubtless they’re all either huddled fearfully in their rooms or locked outside the front gate. What I’m doing now wouldn’t be possible if the kitchens were as busy as they normally would be in the early morning.

The guards check the kitchen, grumbling about jumpy mages and making jokes about the kid getting a whipping for the false alarm.

Amateurs. They should be more afraid because they haven’t seen anything, not less.

With the ka’kari, I quickly open the lock to the coal chute, hide what coal is still piled inside in one of the great black kettles nearby, and take my unstrung bow from my pack. I’m flexible enough to fit into such a small space, but I won’t be taking anything extra with me. I stow the bow behind one of the neat piles of wood along one wall, tie one end of my bowstring around the latch of the coal chute door, and tie the other end to my foot so I can pull the door closed behind me.

I hear the guards coming to the kitchen again. Early.

Somehow, I wedge myself into the coal chute and begin to wiggle my way up into it. But I haven’t pulled my feet all the way into the dark tunnel, much less closed the chute door behind me when I hear one of them say, “What’s that?”

In my exhaustion, I actually freeze instead of acting immediately. Do I throw myself back into the room and start killing, or flee?

“Alarm!” another voice says. “Murder! Upstairs somewhere! C’mon!”

I wait until I hear them running, then wiggle forward and pull the chute’s door shut behind me with the bowstring tied to my foot, closing myself into the darkness.

The chute is as unpleasant as you’d imagine, thick with dust, smelling slightly of rotten eggs, and not cut smooth. It takes me a few minutes to make it to the grate at the top. It’s locked. Seriously, why couldn’t the full-time staff here be as incompetent as the mercenaries?

I would’ve been in real trouble if I didn’t have the ka’kari to cut through the hinges for me.

~Is that appreciation? Finally.~

I ignore it as I so often do and flop into the street, coughing, spitting grit, thankful for the sweetness of the relatively clean air.

But I don’t allow myself to lie there in the alley. The rest of the city knows nothing of what just happened, and morning bustle is in full force, the only change being the large knot of tradespeople stuck outside the mansion’s locked front gate, demanding to know why they can’t come in.

I climb to a vantage down the block as shrill whistles cut the morning air. I’ve gotten away clean.

Well, not clean. I need to find someplace safe to bathe—and sleep. Using the ka’kari and my Talent so much takes it out of me, and I haven’t slept in…I’m not sure how long it’s been.

But maybe now that Trudana’s dead I’ll be able to sleep again.

I turn the thought over as I see men saddling horses inside the mansion’s walls, rushing about. I see the red magical shielding come down.

No. Probably not. Good sleep isn’t in the cards for someone like me. But I can flop unconscious into a bed for a few hours before the nightmares visit again. That’s probably the best I can hope for, after all I’ve been through. After all I’ve done.

Daytime is no time for a living piece of the night, so I’m about to melt away safely from the morning light when something down a side street below me catches my eye. It’s a raggedy street kid young enough that at first I can’t tell if it’s a boy or girl, hair cropped short against the lice and fleas. Intentionally going around a corner from the bigger kids who might take his prize, the kid pulls out a ball.

Not a ball. The ball. I can tell from the kid’s delight at his new treasure. He must have found it wherever it landed after the mage tossed it out of the estate an hour ago.

The crowds at the front gate are parting, tradesmen and horsemen yelling at each other, and suddenly I know exactly what’s going to happen.

I don’t know where the horsemen think they’re going. Surely they can’t think they’re going to find me, but I see them splitting up, maybe thirty of them, going different ways in groups. Maybe taking messages to friends or superiors, maybe hoping to head me off somehow.

They’re getting jammed up by the morning crowds.

The kid’s down an empty side street, but that’s precisely what’s going to put him in danger. I just know it. One of those knots of horsemen is going to come charging down that empty street five abreast with no room to maneuver. They’re gonna come around that blind corner, and…

And it’s not my problem.

I’ve gotten away clean; I left no compelling evidence that I was Trudana Jadwin’s killer. If I go down there now, I could ruin everything.

Besides, the kid could move at any time. It’s his own fault.

~Who are you trying to convince?~

I’m already moving. Not to save the kid. Just to get closer.

I see the horses break free of the crowd, and everything happens exactly the way I knew it would. The horses run over the stupid kid, sending him flying, with one of them stomping on the stupid kid’s head and smashing it open.

~That’s what you want me to record? You want to skip the part where you fell to the earth like a meteorite burning with sapphire flames, made two of the horses throw their riders, scooped up the kid, deposited him safely a few blocks away, and then disappeared?~

I was planning to skip that, yes.

~So then…should I cut out the earlier bit about you being honest?~

Would you obey me if I told you to leave it my way?

The ka’kari doesn’t answer, and now isn’t the time to find out what would happen if push comes to shove.

Fine. Leave it however the hell you want. But saving that kid was a mistake. It gave me away, confirmed Repha’im’s suspicions, and put Momma K’s head on the block. I should never have done it. The rest of this wouldn’t have happened if I’d let the stupid kid die.

Chapter Seven: No Contract, No Pay

The rooftop of my building in Elenea is high enough to be removed from the bustling city below and windy enough to be perilous. The night air is cold enough to be bracing and clean enough to be refreshing, and yet it does nothing to clear my head.

I didn’t tell you how it went when I talked with Count Drake. I hadn’t thought it through beforehand. Story of my life, huh? I’d meant to offer the account to him. Scribble it all down in my little black codex and drop it off with his porter, maybe. But I didn’t do that. I just showed up.

He was overjoyed to see me until I told him why I was there. Said he didn’t want anyone killing anyone for him, said he got out of that line of work a long time ago—that there was nothing that could more imperil his soul.

Yeah, he still loves to talk about his soul. And mine too, if I’m not quick to head off the conversation.

I thought that meant he was sort of glad I’d done it without him asking me to. Foolishly, I said so. Shouldn’t have. I wasn’t in a good frame of mind, but then I haven’t been for a long time.

He said some things that were all fair and true and hurt like hell.

I said things I regret.

Honestly, I don’t know why I thought he’d want to hear about me killing Trudana Jadwin in the first place. Me, regaling him like a drunk veteran trying to impress some new recruit? Given Drake’s history, it was more like a kid hot off his first battle bragging to an old master sergeant about all his fighting experience. The hell was I thinking?

That he’d break down in tears because I’d given him closure, that I’d given his daughters justice? That he’d tearfully admit I’ve redeemed all I’ve become because I used my skills for him?

That he’d be impressed?

Gods, I wanted him to tell me I did good, didn’t I? I thought I’d stride back into the Drakes’ lives and things would somehow be good again, normal. That we could just talk.

I’ve got no one to talk to.

How did Durzo do it, being alone all those years?

Hell, I even managed to louse things up with him, quarreling with and driving away the one person in all Midcyru who really could understand, and maybe even help me.

Maybe I just need to talk. I mean, I’m not weak. It’s good enough to put it all into words, like this, to the ka’kari. It’s good to hear yourself, and good to see what you’ve said later, so you don’t keep going in the same circles, stuck in your own head. I don’t have the patience to journal and the ka’kari can record things in real time, so I’ve decided to keep this up for a bit. There’s something soothing about a flow of words, even if they’re your own.

There are people down there in that moonlit city, people who’d be happy to fawn over the war hero Kylar Stern. People who want things from me. Funny how all the ones who really know me are angry at me, have left to go do better things, or are dead.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I don’t need any more than this. This life is good enough. Good even! I’ve got all I need. I’m not starving. Have a warm place to sleep. Things to call my own. Everything I wanted as a kid on the streets? I’ve got it all.

Maybe the night air has cleared my head. There’s something rattling around in my chest, a hollow discontent, but maybe no one ever gets rid of that; maybe that’s just the pain that lets you know you’re alive. How could I want any more than this? I’m fine.

Chapter Eight: A Visit from Mom

The tulip is dead. Has been for a while now.

I think it died while I was in Cenaria killing Lady Jadwin. Nothing I’ve done has revived it. It’d probably be dead by now regardless. I should throw it out. Every day, when I can’t bear them anymore, I crawl out of my twisted blankets on the floor, and there it is, cheerily desiccated, the only adornment in my aggressively bare apartments.

Logan wanted to give me a mansion in his new capital city, wanted to honor me in a hundred ways after the Battle of Black Barrow. He’s a good man. I think he’s even a good king, despite his taste in friends. I didn’t want honors. Didn’t want a huge house because I don’t want staff. I don’t want to be tied to anything. Any people I had would be a hindrance. I would put them in danger. I would be a danger.

After I refused, he gave me this building instead, seven stories tall, filled with luxurious apartments for visiting diplomats and wealthy traders and lords who are all scrambling to set up business in the high king’s new capital. Logan took care of the building’s staffing and security, appointing a trustworthy chatelaine—this place is too fancy for a mere landlady—who collects the rents and does…whatever it is such people do. Apparently, my profits are deposited into accounts with numerous banking families around the city. I don’t know. I’ve never checked.

I occupy the cavernous top floor myself. Have my own entrance. Have secure exits from the roof if I need them. No one bothers me anymore.

There were some attempts on my life in the first couple months. Nothing serious.

But something feels wrong this morning. Some intuition of danger stirs me.

As if unaware, I ease the tension in my muscles and scrub the sleep out of my eyes, checking the empty room in quick glances.

Nothing.

I check the sight lines in through the windows before I move, in case a marksman is out somewhere, lining up the shot. Then I do my usual: checking my traps and mechanically putting hardtack and jerked meat in my belly. Maybe it’s a false alarm. It happens. I had a pigeon trigger one of my trip wires once and spent half the night lying in wait, ready to ambush attackers who never came.

I leave my blankets in a pile and don’t change or wash my clothes. What’s the point? I’ll be training in them later. I don’t shave my scraggly dark stubble. My fingers catch as I try to brush my unruly hair out of my eyes. It’s not only sticking every which way, it’s starting to mat. If I don’t wash it soon, I’m going to have to cut it off. Funny how I’m rich now, and I probably looked better when I lived on the streets.

In my left hand, I pick up my dead tulip in its white pot and take it out to my balcony to give it some sun. The flower is withered and ugly, the leaves yellow and brown. I should give up on it. I know. I know how to care for and harvest dozens of the most common poison-yielding plants, but nothing I’ve tried has brought my tulip back.

If it were a regular plant, I’d give up. But it’s not. And the only thing I can think of that might bring it back is magic.

Unfortunately, finding someone who might do that kind of magic means leaving my apartments. It means talking to someone. It means trusting someone not to destroy my last reminder of her.

I’ve barely started on the rope work portion of my morning training when there’s rapping on my door. My heart stops and I flip silently to the floor, landing on my toes.

People aren’t supposed to be able to get access to my private stairway.

“Kylar?” a woman’s voice says.

I walk to the door. It has a spy hole, but I don’t use it.

“You,” I say, as I pull the door open. It comes out ruder than I meant, so I try to make amends with “How is it you look younger every time I see you?”

“Shut up and get out of my way,” Momma K says, pushing past me as if I’m a recalcitrant child. She waves at her bodyguards to stay outside. They obey without question.

With her perfume filling my nostrils—head notes of neroli, maté, and ambrette seed, heart notes of jasmine and orange blossom and maybe tiare flower, and a base of cedar, black ootai, and chestnut?—I close the door behind her like a doorman. It’s a new perfume for her, just as expensive as her old scent, but more regal.

“Please do come in, Your Grace,” I say to her back, sarcastic.

She’s staring around my place with obvious displeasure, then at me, disgust yielding to disappointment.

The woman known as Gwinvere Kirena Thorne, or Duchess Thorne—or merely Momma K to us old guild rats and gutter kids—is never less than well put together, but she’s the soul of cold style today, in loose casual dress of cerulean silk that probably cost more than all my tenants together pay in rent. Lean and graceful, with eyes as sharp as the knives she so long directed, she looks perhaps forty, though she’s at least a decade older.

“They told me,” she says, sniffing at my mess. “But I didn’t think you’d let yourself sink so far.”

“May it please Your Grace,” I say, sweeping into an elaborate court bow, “I have not yet begun to sink.” Momma K taught me whatever courtly manners I still have, and this goes over as well as expected.

She gives me a flat stare, but I’m not a street kid shivering in her parlor anymore. She says, “I brought you a present. But that’s not why I’m here. I’ve been trying to avoid it for both our sakes, but the real reason I’ve come is to hire you.”

“Good! I was hoping this would be a short conversation.”

“You owe me, Kylar.”

I purse my lips. “Get someone else.”

“I’ve tried. It’s an impossible job.”

“There are no impossible jobs, only impossible prices,” I say automatically.

“Exactly what Durzo used to say, right before he’d gouge me.” She smiles, amused, and the room’s chill goes balmy, but my numbness insulates me even from her.

“Then why don’t you make him do it?” I ask.

She looks away, and I see her spinning a ring on one finger with her thumb. It has only a small white opal on it. The rubies she wears today make it look almost comically small and modest. A wedding ring perhaps?

“He’s…unavailable,” she says, forcing a smile.

Starting life on the streets gave me a keen sense of when someone might get violent, at the cost of being worse at differentiating other emotional states, and Momma K is such a skilled liar I shouldn’t be able to tell that she’s forcing that smile, so either she wants me to see the pretense for what it is, or her pain is so sharp she can’t hide it.

I’m guessing it’s manipulation. She wants me to ask about Durzo. Or if her pain is real, she’s probably planning to use it to get me to do this job for her, whatever it is.

“That’s too bad,” I say. “Thanks for coming by.”

I walk toward the door to usher her out.

Instead, she heads out onto my balcony.

I feel like a petulant child, but I don’t follow her. I walk back to my ropes and am about to resume my exercises when I see that she’s busy with something out on the balcony.

I’m there in an instant.

“Put that down!” I say.

Her back is to me. A knife flashes in her hands, and a brown leaf drops to the ground. Then another. Another.

My tulip. But I can’t even move to stop her.

“It’s not a kill,” she says.

“What? The flower? Stop!”

She sighs, as if she expects better from me. “The job. Anyone else doing the job would have to kill people to get it done. Innocent people. And if we hesitate, innocents will die regardless. You’re the only one who can do it cleanly. One little heist, Kylar. It might save Logan’s life. Maybe more. Maybe much more.”

“A heist? Heists never work. And why me? I’m a wetboy, not a thief.” She knows how I feel about Logan. I don’t want her to press me on that. “Hell, I’m not even that anymore.”

“A heist’s not so dissimilar from an assassination, is it? And they can work if you keep them simple. Just do what you did at Lord Repha’im’s estate—minus the torture and murder and being spotted like an amateur.”

I don’t bother denying it. I’m not going to discuss that job. “For the last time—”

She gestures out at the city. “Have you thought through the implications of building this city on top of a magically preserved ancient battlefield?”

The shift in topic baffles me. “Haven’t been worrying about it, no,” I say.

“I have. The dome and the magic that kept people out of this area for centuries also protected some things inside it. Most of what people brought to that last battle long ago has decayed, of course, especially the magical items. But some survived. Of those, some were stolen immediately, before I realized no one else was placing guards out there and decided to do it myself. You see, I consider everything recovered from Black Barrow to belong to our new high king. I want those things back. All of them.”

“That’s nice,” I say. She hates it when I give her that tone.

“Trouble is, the people I’d send to find powerful or intriguing magical items are all…”

She lets the sentence hang, quizzing me. “Mages themselves,” I say, begrudgingly playing her game. I know where this goes next, so I say, “And mages are precisely the people who have the most to gain by keeping whatever they find.”

“See? There’s that mind I love, Kylar. Sharp as a splitting maul.”

“Aren’t splitting mauls—”

“Exactly. Follow along now. In the midst of doing everything necessary to guide the setup of not one kingdom, but four, I’ve had to trust people, and then I’ve had to trust the people I set to watch over those people. Problem: Not all of them are worthy of trust.”

“That must’ve been a shocking revelation for an old crime boss,” I say. “But I don’t like where this is going. It sounds like this job comes with a side of assassination after all.”

Momma K has never taken betrayal lightly. Before she switched which side of the law she worked on, Durzo had worked for her, and he’d done a lot of work for her.

“No one likes where this is going,” she says pleasantly. “We should all just get along. We should agree Logan is the best king any of us is likely to see for a hundred years. We should serve him without reservation. Isn’t it nice that when people see what they should do, they do it with no further prompting?” Her tone is sweet, but impatient.

“No need for that,” I say. I feel sullen. Worse, I sound it.

“We want the same thing, Kylar,” she says.

“I want you to leave me alone.”

“Happily. But we both want Logan safe.”

“I want that because I believe in him,” I say. “You want it not only because he’s the only noble who would’ve ever taken a risk on you, but because he still is. You keep Logan safe because it keeps you safe and in power. Logan goes, and so do you.”

She sighs. “Still have that stubborn streak of righteous idealism, huh? Even after everything. The question is: So what, Kylar? So what if I’m being purely selfish in this?”

It takes me off guard, because, in truth, I’m know I’m being an ass. On most days, I’d tell you Momma K is as hard as her circumstances have always required. Momma K pretends that everything she does is in naked self-interest. The truth is that she turns her better nature into also serving her self-interest: feeding and sheltering and saving the lives of street kids? She could never admit she hates seeing starving, abused children. No, she declared that was simply an investment, because the street kids of today would be the criminals of the future. Earn their loyalty now, she’d say, and the best of them will stay loyal forever.

She fishes in one of her pockets and tosses me a silvery band. I catch it. By the weight, I guess it’s white gold, not silver, a bracelet with a deeply cut endless knot in some ancient style I can’t place. “This is my gift?” I ask. “Jewelry? You shouldn’t have. And I mean that.”

“That’s not my gift. It’s a trinket. At least that’s what Durzo said when he asked me to pass it along. Holds the ka’kari for you when you want it close but not touching your skin. Said you might figure out when that would be wise in a decade or two.”

Ouch. That does sound like Durzo. “Magical?” I ask.

She snorts. “That’s what I asked, too. He said no, but platinum resists devouring. Subsequent tests verified it’s not magical.”

“Ah.” Platinum. Not white gold. And of course she tested it.

“Speaking of ka’kari,” she says.

“Were we speaking of the ka’kari?” I ask. “I thought we were on to talking about the gift you have for me?”

“No. Ka’kari. Kylar, you have the greatest of the ka’kari. We know that a few of the others are safely guarded in Ezra’s Wood, but—oh, I have your attention now.”

I hadn’t even noticed, but I took a breath and braced myself as soon as she said others. “You have word of another ka’kari? Hidden here?” I ask.

“I have rumors. Cold trails. Tales of magic gone awry. Mount Tenji spewing fire and ash for a hundred days after the battle. The Tlaxini Maelstrom collapsing. Sea serpents in the Black Waters off Friaku. Tidal waves on Gandu and the Silk Coast. Magic gone awry. Omens. Terrified priests. All the usual noise. But the greatest danger I can imagine to Logan—and to the rest of us—comes from the ka’kari. The mages are hinting at bad days coming. This is a long-term play I have for you, Kylar, but it’s a big one. One skirmish in a long war with a hundred fronts. It’s my job to foresee threats to the man you say you love so much.”

The man I say I love so much? That nettles me, but I see it’s a hook, a trap, a manipulation. She gets me to talk about Logan, and then what I owe him, and then how I can serve him—by serving Momma K. So I swallow my anger, ignore her bait. “You want me to hunt rumors? That’s not a heist, that’s spy work.”

“What’s been stolen is an artifact. Translated it’s called the Crepuscular Compass.”

“The come again?”

Momma K sighs. “The Twilight Compass, then, either the time between times at either morning or night. Maybe it only works at those times. Maybe something about it is particularly shadowy. I don’t know. What matters is we need it. It will help us find who holds the ka’kari…or at least who last held them.”

“How’s it do that?”

“It’s got another name. One you should find most intriguing. Its only power is that it helps find people. Supposedly, you do whatever’s required to activate it, then you speak the name given at birth to a person and it points toward them. It doesn’t tell you how far away they are, or even if they’re living or dead. It merely points toward them. A very limited artifact, as such things go, but…”

I frown. “Limited? I can think of a thousand uses for such a thing. Especially for wet work.”

She smiles with genuine affection for me, and if I don’t miss my guess, with a certain joy at being understood. “Me too,” she says. “Which I’d guess is how it picked up its other name. A demigoddess, a daughter of Mother Night herself, she was an early avatar of retributive justice. The one who follows: implacable, merciless, ruthless, relentless in her pursuit of the guilty. Remind you of anything?”

She isn’t asking if I know the goddess’s name. She means that the goddess sounds a lot like a Night Angel. In some tellings, the first of us. I ignore the chill down my back. “It reminds me of a superstition Durzo once laughed about.”

“Durzo can afford to laugh about a lot of things the rest of us should fear. But that’s beside the point. Even if Nemesis never existed, even if this artifact has no connection to her whatsoever, I believe this Nemesis Compass is real. We can’t afford not to act as if it is. The mere possibility that it exists tells me that it’s worth a lot of effort to make sure no one else gets it. You understand?”

I do. More than she’d like. I see now how carefully she crafted her pitch. The connection to the Night Angel, the magic, the fear of losing something powerful to some enemy. “Sounds like a real important job,” I say. “But I’ve got an important job already. I’m a landlord now.”

She scoffs, amused. “Kylar, if you were going to retire, you’d’ve done it. You wouldn’t have done that job at the Repha’im estate. Some of my best agents have been doing ‘one last job’ for me for twenty years, Kylar. Truth is, people like us don’t get new jobs. We’re lucky if we get new masters—a thousand times luckier than most if our new master is a man like Logan. No matter how you lie to yourself, you’ll get pulled back into the life, and the longer you wait to do what you must, the more heartache and grief you’ll cause everyone around you.”

I cut her off. “I’m glad you’ve found work that’ll let you sleep at night. Good for you.” I pause. “But then, you never did have a troubled conscience, did you? No matter what. Guess that’s just me and my weakness.”

For a moment, I see a flash of real anger in her eyes, but then she glances at the sun and sheathes her little belt knife. “Please do excuse me. I’ve been commanded to appear before the high king today. I knew the nobles would move against me—an old whore, in charge over them? I knew they’d find it unbearable—but I didn’t expect it so soon. I’m being put on trial for gross misuse of power and murder. So either Lord Repha’im is a fool, or…well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

“Murder?” I ask. “You? What murder?”

“Yes, Kylar. You didn’t think you were solving problems with that little stunt of yours, did you?” She finally turns to face me. “Lord Repha’im is alleging that Trudana Jadwin was assassinated on my orders. Cenaria is my city. My turf, my responsibility.”

She hands me the flowerpot, which I take dumbly. A bare brown stem jutting from bare brown earth is all that’s left. “I may have saved the bulb from the rot setting in, though you won’t know until next year,” she says, as if she hadn’t just announced she was heading to trial for a murder I committed. “In gardening, death requires management, Kylar. One must neither rush it nor delay it too long. You’ve done both, but perhaps this may still bloom again.”

“Answer’s still no,” I say.

She produces a handkerchief and wipes her hands. She’s never minded getting them dirty, but one can’t appear in court with visibly soiled hands.

“Kylar, you have no idea how much it’s costing Logan to protect you while you’ve been here pouting like a child, and he can’t afford it. Cut the stem off in a couple weeks,” she says, patting my cheek. The maternal kindness of the gesture is belied by the stone in her gaze. “One way or the other, I won’t be here to do it for you.”

“Hey,” I say. “I thought you said you brought me a present. Where is it?”

“Not it. He. He’s in the hall. Actually, he’s a good example of the last thing I wanted to tell you.” She squints in distaste as she looks at my face. “Do something well or don’t do it at all. That includes growing a beard.”

“Why don’t you just say it?” I demand.

“What is it you want me to say?” she asks, as if she doesn’t know. Being treated as if I’m stupid has always been an easy way to get me furious.

“Say it! ‘She’s dead, Kylar.’ ‘Get over it, Kylar. Move on.’ ‘You’ve had your time to grieve, Kylar.’”

She looks at me as if I’m a puzzle to solve. “I won’t say any of those things because I don’t say idiotic things, Kylar. You’ll never get over Elene. Either your character or your circumstances will force you to start moving forward again. That’s all. And she won’t move with you, because she’s gone. And that will hurt. And then someday you’ll start to forget her from time to time. And that will hurt too. And then you’ll forget her for longer and longer, and that will hurt more. You won’t be able to recall her face exactly, and that will feel like betrayal. And on, and on. No one’s saying there’s no pain, Kylar. Pain is part of the deal. Maybe it’s the whole deal.”

“It’s a bad deal,” I say, though this conversation echoes one we had long ago too closely for comfort.

“There is no other deal,” she says softly. “So grow the hell up.”

She goes—and it irks me that she doesn’t even have the common decency to slam the door.

Chapter Nine: The Weight of Shadows

The Chantry’s scholars posit three types of immortality. Only the One God himself—if such a fiend exists—might have the highest type: total invulnerability to time and to the sword. Below that, the elshaddim never age, but when embodied they are partly vulnerable to the sword: Though their essences are undying, their bodies may be killed, and such a death banishes them from taking on flesh again. The highest kind of immortality a human might hope for, even with the most powerful magic, is the lowest type. “Don’t call it eternal life,” the scholars say in their measured speech. “Call it life indefinitely extended, where aging is slowed perhaps to a stop, but otherwise, all else is as before.”

They say all this with the great confidence of women who are entirely wrong.

I know, for I am what they say cannot be. Not only am I invulnerable to time’s patient knives, but given enough time, my body will Heal me of anything, even death.

Of course there’s a catch. Several. No one explained to me how it works, and it took me several lives to figure out the worst part: Every time I die, no matter what, someone I love dies in my place.

Every time I get to know someone, my first thought is that if I care for this person, the only decent thing for me to do is to leave quickly, before I like them enough to force them unwittingly into Death’s queue.

I have a thirst for justice I can’t suppress. All my talents are for violence. I grew up on the streets, where I was trained by a legend in all the arts of killing. Everything I am has been shaped for fast, lethal action.

Everywhere I look, I see suffering calling out for my skills—but I don’t know if there’s anything I can change in this world that’s worth me slowly causing the deaths of everyone I care about. If I slip, the innocent die for me. My failures have already cost me the one light in my world of darkness: my sweet, steadfast wife.

This is why I must be perfect. This is why I have to find out what’s caused this curse I bear, and end it.

My name is Kylar Stern. I am the Night Angel, and this is the weight of shadows.

I don’t know how to tell this damned story. Everything I try is a lie. A story’s a promise, isn’t it? This isn’t the story of how I tried to end my curse. Maybe it should be. Remind me to come back and try something else. This is all wrong.

Viridiana exhaled slowly. And again, blinking against a tide of emotions she could never name.

Kylar hadn’t come back to fix it. Hadn’t tried something else later.

She knew why.

Chapter Ten: A Godking in Ruins

You’re too late,” the man says, coming inside, the words rattling rough from a rusty throat. Softening his hard-angled face, he has a magnificent, neatly trimmed black beard. At the moment, he doesn’t look like a madman.

But he doesn’t look like a former king, either. Momma K’s ‘present’ is none other than Dorian Ursuul, formerly a renowned Healer and mage, and later formerly Godking Wanhope, king of Khalidor and Lodricar. He is a man who’s disrupted my life more than once.

His clothes are fine, but disheveled, as if he sleeps in them. Rather than a deposed king or a madman, however, he looks like a kid who’s getting away with something and is pleased with himself about it. His black hair is awry, but not dirty, and he doesn’t have the pinched look of starvation, which tells me he’s only recently escaped his handlers.

As I understand it, Dorian spends the majority of his time catatonic, sitting in one corner of the castle or another, unresponsive. He’ll chew and swallow food given to him and give signs when he needs to use a latrine, and follow where he’s led, but that’s it.

Logan had him examined by every sort of magical and medical authority he could find, and they were unanimous in concluding he’s not faking his condition, whatever it is. Nor does he try to evade responsibility for his misrule when he does come to his senses for brief interludes.

A harder king, or perhaps a wiser one, would have executed him.

Dorian is a prophet, though no one agrees exactly what that means.

He has a long beard now, and his icy blue eyes are going glassy, slowly losing their focus on mine.

“Nice to see you looking well, Dorian,” I say.

He snaps back to the present. “Sane, you mean?”

“Yes,” I admit. “Too late for what?”

He interlaces his fingers and twists them sharply. “You’re looking quite fit,” he says. “Everything about you looks even better than before—”

“Occupational hazard. I train all the—”

“—except your eyes.”

I clench my jaw.

“You’re one of the slow casualties of war, aren’t you?” he says, unfazed. “And you can’t afford to be. How are we ever going to get you moving?”

“You’re the prophet; I’m sure you’ve got just the trick.”

A flash of irritation crosses his face. “You know, I can’t get used to that. Being treated like I have nothing to offer except my one thing. As if I, Dorian, am nothing more than the most inconvenient talent I possess. I who have been a Healer, a king, a student and a master of many of the world’s most difficult magics, reduced in everyone’s eyes to the mad prophet.”’

“Too late for what, Dorian?” I ask again.

“Tell me about the boy.”

“What boy?” I ask.

“The one you didn’t kill.”

“You think I kill children so often that that narrows things down?”

He stares flatly at me. “I don’t have all day, Kylar.”

“If you know enough to ask about it, you know everything about it.”

“No,” he says. “The black ka’kari interferes with my vision. I lose things about you. Miss things.”

“Oh. Good news at last. You’re telling me I can use one irritant to block another? Though I have to confess, it does seem like donning a cloak of mosquitoes to fend off a swarm of bees.”

“Why didn’t you kill the boy?”

“Lost my nerve,” I say.

He squints at me, as if he’s wondering if I’m lying.

“I know I messed up. How much is that gonna cost me?” I ask.

He looks off into the distance. I can’t tell if he’s gone again, and I’m about to ask when he says, “Maybe it’s better to save one child than to save the whole world.”

“The whole world? Is that all?” I ask. “Wow. Just some kid off the street, too! That’s some power!”

“As I recall, you were just some kid off the street.”

“You know the trouble with prophecy, Dorian?” I say, my heat rising.

“A bit,” he says, his affect flat. “But please, do lecture me.”

“The problem with prophecy is prophets.”

“Oh, let’s not make this abstract. You mean the problem with my prophecies is me. And, yes, I fall short, no doubt,” Dorian said. There is nothing weak or apologetic in him now, though.

“No, no, no,” I say. “I mean people assume that the prophet’s merely a vessel for a message, that he doesn’t change the message to steer things how he wants. But I’ve seen what you do when you have knowledge others don’t, Dorian. You knew Logan was alive when you seduced Jenine. You let a grieving bride think her husband was dead so you could marry her yourself. I don’t deny that you try to do good too, but you’re the last person I’d trust with ‘secret knowledge.’”

Dorian levels a hooded gaze at me. “My failings obscure my message. Yes. As I said. You’re accusing me of what I admitted.”

Oh. “Then why are you here? Are you helping Momma K? You clearly have some plan to manipulate me into doing something I don’t want to do.”

A melancholy too deep for words settles around the man who once was regarded as a god. He says, “No, Kylar. All my power is for nothing. My son needs me.”

Something about how he says that is odd. “Son? Only one of them needs you?”

“There only is the one. Ask Vi if you still don’t understand. I don’t have the time to explain. Jenine and I are united in this much at least. Our son needs us, and we can’t save him. I know all our efforts will be in vain, yet we can’t help but try.”

“So you’re going to trick me into doing it,” I say.

His eyes flash, and he talks slowly, as if speaking to an imbecile. “No, because that would be my power changing things. Which I already said won’t work. You don’t even want to hear me, do you?”

I move to speak, but he cuts me off, saying, “Let me try it like this: You ever play pockets?”

“I have.” Smooth table, ivory balls, a stick, and unsurprisingly, pockets as goals. I say, “So far as I can tell, it’s another excuse for noblemen to gamble.”

“Imagine that instead of everything being known and uniform as it is in that game, instead the balls were each different sizes, that you don’t know the number of players, or even the location of all the pockets. Imagine the table is always changing, that sometimes there are grooves and lumps hidden under the felt, and that all the players strike simultaneously and repeatedly. Oh, and the balls have some power to change their own courses. Some even change size in midroll. That’s the game I’m condemned to playing, Kylar, as are we all. In a universe that is free and vast, prophecy is merely being able to see a bit more of the table than most others do.”

“Uh-huh. Right. I still wouldn’t wager against you.”

“All my powers are a breath in a gale, Kylar.”

“Pretend whatever you like.” I raise my hands, palms up. “You’re still here. Swinging your stick at my balls.”

“Kylar, do you know what happens to a man too long isolated?”

“What—”

“I do.”

I squint. “You do…know?”

Dorian’s lips thin in frustration. Then he expels a great breath. Then he stops. He cocks his head suddenly, as if at a sound only he can hear. “No time for follow-ups, I’m afraid. It appears I have only about a ten count of sanity left.”

I don’t want to interrupt, even to urge him on. I don’t want to look eager. This is all a manipulation. It’s all about power. It always is, with these people.

But even though I’m not going to believe a word out of his mouth, I can’t help but be curious what it’s going to be.

Even as the moments slip by, he stares at me hard, as if daring me to yell at him and waste his remaining time.

He finally says, “The Night Angel judges, but who judges him? The truth is, I’m not here to change your path, Kylar. I’m here so that when you don’t, you remember that you chose not to. My revenge is that you judge yourself.”

His eyes go glassy. The mad prophet is mad once more, locked in the solitary confinement of his own skull, and what stares at me now through the bars of all his past decisions has nothing of the divine spark in it. He is an empty vessel in an empty cell.