“Congratulations, Nameless,” the Wolf said. “You’ve proved you can sacrifice yourself like you don’t care if you die. Like you don’t give a damn about the living. How like the young.” The wolfish smile was cruel.
Kylar was too tired to play games. The Wolf didn’t intimidate him anymore. “Why do you hate me?” he asked.
The Wolf cocked his head, taken off guard. “Because you’re a waste, Nameless. People love you more than you have any right to, and you treat them like they’re shit to be scraped off your boots.”
It was so unfair after what Kylar had gone through that he threw his hands up. “You know what, to hell with you. You can make your little cryptic comments and hate me if you want to, but at least call me by my fucking name.”
“And what name is that?” the Wolf asked.
“Kylar. Kylar Stern.”
“Kylar Stern? The stern, undying dier? That’s not a name; it’s a title. It’s a judge.”
“Azoth, then.”
“You are many leagues from that shitless, witless rat, but even were you he, do you know what azoth is?”
“What do you mean?”
The Wolf laughed unkindly. “Azoth is an old word for quicksilver. Random, formless, unpredictable, literally mercurial. You, Nameless, can be anyone and thus are no one. You’re smoke, a shadow that melts away in the light of day. Kagé they call you. A shadow of what you could be and a shadow of your master, who was a titan.”
“My master was a coward! He never even told me who he was!” Kylar shouted. He blinked. The depth of his rage left him shaken. Where had that come from?
The Wolf was pensive. The ghosts in the room fell silent. Then, in a murmur unintelligible to Kylar’s ears, one of them spoke to the Wolf. The Wolf folded his hands over his stomach. He nodded, acquiescing. “Prince Acaelus Thorne of Trayethell was a warrior and not much else. Neither introspective nor wise, he was one of the rare good men who love war. He didn’t hate himself or life. He wasn’t cruel. He simply gloried in a contest with the highest possible stakes. He was good at it, too, and he became one of Jorsin Alkestes’ best friends.
“That nettled one of Jorsin’s other best friends, an easily nettled archmagus named Ezra, who thought Acaelus a charismatic fool who happened to be good at swinging a sword. In return, Acaelus thought Ezra a coward who took Jorsin away from where he belonged in the front lines. When the Champions were chosen—the men and women who were Jorsin’s final hope of victory—Ezra intended to bond the Devourer himself. It was by far the most powerful ka’kari and he had sweat and bled for it. The only man to whom he would willingly surrender it was Jorsin. But the Devourer didn’t choose Ezra. Or Jorsin. It chose the sword-swinger.
“Perhaps you can appreciate why it seemed odd that an artifact which by its nature was concerned with concealment would go to a man completely lacking subtlety.”
It did seem odd, though the choice had obviously proved wise.
“The Devourer didn’t choose your master simply because he was an obscure choice. It chose Acaelus because it understood his heart. Acaelus loved the clash of arms, but most men who love battle love it because it proves their mastery over others. If the Devourer had given itself to a man who loved power as Ezra did, it would have spawned a tyrant of terrible proportions. Think of a God-king made truly a god and you have a bit of it. What your master loved, at his core, was the brotherhood of war. He thirsted for the camaraderie of men risking all to come through for each other.
“The Devourer is nothing if not talented at setting up tensions. For your master to take the black ka’kari, he had to leave that brotherhood. He had to give up what he loved most and become known as a traitor. That tension forced Acaelus to become a deeper, wiser, and sadder man. Then of course, there was the Devourer’s greater tension and greater power. Your master was a man of war, but the vagaries of war are such that even the mighty might be clipped by a stray arrow or a falling horse or the mistake of a friend. So your master lived with the tension of his calling pulling against his fear for any he loved.
“Acaelus sought to live in peace. He had a few lifetimes as a farmer, a hunter, an apothecary, a perfumer, a blacksmith—can you imagine? Yet though they were full lives—sometimes married, even with children—they were not fulfilled lives, for a man who denies what is essential to his being is a man who drills holes in the cup of his own happiness. How could he help but resent those he loved as they kept him from his calling? Here was a man who could lead armies, who could defeat invasions almost single-handedly. This man was compelled to farm? By his own love? Time and again, he returned to the battlefield because the evil was too great to be ignored. And sometimes he was victorious and there was no price to pay. And sometimes his wife died, but it was worse when his children died; his marriages never survived his children’s deaths. He was a man who never learned to forgive himself.”
Kylar was missing some essential piece that the Wolf thought he understood, but the man kept speaking, and Kylar was so hungry to hear more about his master that he didn’t dare interrupt.
“So in the end, he sought to defeat the power of the ka’kari by defeating love,” the Wolf said. “He thought that if he refused to love, death could take nothing from him. He deafened himself to love’s voice with killing and whoring and drinking. He became a wetboy because wetboys cannot love. He was ultimately successful, and the ka’kari abandoned him because he finally knew love’s antithesis.”
“Hatred?”
“Indifference. When Vonda’s life was threatened, Durzo was relieved. The path he took was a reasonable one—he kept the ka’kari out of young Garoth Ursuul’s hands—but the truth was that he didn’t really care if Vonda died. That was what broke the ka’kari’s bond.”
“But he came back. Even after I bonded the ka’kari.”
“Because he loved you, Kylar. He chose to die for you, to give up everything he still had—his sword, his ka’kari, his power, his life—for you. There is no greater love. Such a death was rewarded with new life.”
“By who? You?” Kylar asked. The Wolf said nothing. “The ka’kari? The God?”
“Perhaps it is just the way greatest magic works: justice and mercy entwined. It’s a mystery, Kylar. A mystery on a par with the question of why is there life at all? If you wish to answer the mystery by positing a God, you can, or you can say that it just is—and either way, be glad for it, for it is a gift. Or a most fortunate accident.”
Kylar felt suddenly small in the workings of a universe vast beyond comprehension, vast and yet perhaps not ambivalent even to Durzo’s suffering. One last life—a sheer gift. The ka’kari was even more strange and marvelous than he’d imagined.
“I thought . . .” Kylar shook his head. “I thought it was just amazing magic.”
The Wolf laughed, and even the ghosts in the room seemed startled. “It is amazing magic, it just isn’t just amazing magic. The most potent magics are tied to human truths: beauty and passion and yearning and fortitude and valor and empathy. It is from these that the ka’kari draw their strength as much as it is from the magic they are imbued with.”