Beyond the Shadows

“A couple of the ka’kari. He wants them all—and Curoch and Iures.”

“Iures?”

“The companion to Curoch. The Sword of Power and the Staff of Law. Jorsin died the day Iures was finished, before he could use it. No one knows what happened to it.”

“But what’s the Wolf trying to accomplish?”

“I don’t know. Kylar, we’ve held one ka’kari, and its power is awesome. Imagine what an archmagus could do with seven ka’kari and Curoch and Iures. Even if the Wolf is Ezra, would you trust a madman with that much power? Would you even trust yourself? What if the Wolf isn’t Ezra, what if it’s Roygaris?”

“So you’ve opposed him,” Kylar said.

“After I gave him the brown ka’kari, I thought better of it. Since then, I’ve scattered ka’kari to the ends of the earth. This is no short-term ambition. It has taken the Wolf seven hundred years to get a few ka’kari and now Curoch, and perhaps Iures. He doesn’t care if it takes another hundred years to get the rest. This is part of your burden. Make sure he doesn’t get them all.”

“But he might be on our side,” Kylar said.

“You tell that to all the innocents he’s murdered.”

“What do I tell all the innocents you’ve murdered?”

Durzo blinked. He chewed on his lip. “The problem with the black ka’kari is that it doesn’t work in a mirror. I could never see the state of my own soul, and you can’t see yours either. But if you wish, bring it to your eyes now. Judge me.”

Kylar didn’t dare. Durzo had poisoned dozens during the coup alone. There were surely hundreds—thousands—more deaths on his soul. If Kylar saw profound guilt, he might not be able to stop himself from killing Durzo. Or at least trying. It wasn’t a fight he wanted to win, and now that he knew the cost of losing, that was even worse. “What should I do about the Wolf?” Kylar asked.

“Nothing now. But if you hear that Mount Tenji isn’t spitting fire for the first time in two centuries, or you hear that the Tlaxini Maelstrom has stilled, you need to move fast. Like I said, this is not a short-term threat.”

“When does it end?”

Durzo snorted. His hand moved to his belt where he used to carry a small pouch of garlic cloves. He noticed and gritted his teeth. “It could be hundreds of years. It could be twenty. Giving him Curoch was a big mistake.”

Thanks. “Can we win?”

“We? I’m mortal now, kid. At best I have thirty, forty years left? I’m not terribly interested in tangling with the Wolf. Can you win? It’s possible. He can’t live forever. His magic’s only an imitation of ours. Yours.”

“He made one black ka’kari, why not make another one for himself?” Kylar asked.

“Made it? No. Ezra found it. He studied it to make the others, but they were all inferior copies.”

“It told me—”

“Let me guess, something about being crafted with ‘limited intelligence’? The black ka’kari was ancient when I was born, Kylar. It told you that so it wouldn’t scare the shit out of you. You’re sharing your head with a being whose power dwarfs yours.”

~I wouldn’t say my power exactly dwarfs yours.~

“Give the fucker my regards,” Durzo said.

~I loved you better than you loved yourself, Acaelus.~

“I have to say, though, if he tells you to move, do it,” Durzo said.

Right. Thanks. The first time the ka’kari had spoken to Kylar, it told him to duck. He hadn’t—and had taken an arrow through the chest moments later. “Wait,” Kylar said. “You never answered my question about dying by Curoch before the ka’kari kills someone in my place.”

“Don’t,” Durzo said. “It’s not the ka’kari that kills anyone. It’s us. You’re twenty years old and you’ve died five, six times? That’s not the ka’kari’s fault.”

“Fine, it’s my fault. Curoch?”

Irritation passed over Durzo’s face, but he let it go. “Dying by Curoch might leave the person you love alive. Equally possible is that it will kill everyone you love. It’s a feral magic. Curoch means the Sunderer. It was not intended for gentle things. It’s a bad gamble, kid.”

Kylar exhaled heavily. “This is all kind of a lot to absorb at once.”

“Then absorb while we ride. We’re burning daylight.”

They rode until dark, and ate together, speaking only of inconsequential things. Kylar told Durzo everything that had happened in his absence. Durzo laughed, sometimes in the wrong places, as if laughing at similarities to his own memories, but more frequently than Kylar remembered him ever laughing before.

Then Durzo began telling stories. Kylar was surprised to find him an excellent raconteur. “I was a bard one life,” Durzo said. “I took it up to train my memory. I wasn’t very good.”

Some of the stories he told were familiar from bards’ tales Kylar had heard, though the details were very different. He told of a young Alexan the Blessed caught with dysentery in the mountains during his first campaign taking off his plate cuisses and dropping his mail trousers to squat in the bushes and then getting ambushed. His descriptions of Alexan fighting with a sword in one hand and trying to hike up his armor with the other had Kylar howling. Then Alexan tumbled down the mountain and fell a hundred feet. They found him at the bottom without a scratch—or his trousers, which had caught in a tree ten feet from the bottom of the ravine, slowing his fall and saving his life. “The Tomii used shitting as an intensifier, like we might say someone was damn lucky, they said he was shitting lucky. That’s why they called him Alexan the Shitting Lucky. Later some prude translated it Alexan the Blessed. He was a good kid.” Durzo laughed. Then his smile faded. “Broke my heart to kill him. But he needed killing by the end.”

Kylar looked at his master intently. He said, “You’re different now.”

Durzo said nothing for a long time. He was like a caterpillar half-metamorphosed. One minute he was the old, hard-as-nails Durzo. The next he was this laughing, reminiscing stranger.

“The Wolf has worked with me for almost seven hundred years. Ezra and Roygaris were the best Healers ever. Whichever the Wolf is, he’s seen me die and come back dozens of times. He knows the magic and how exactly the ka’kari worked with my body. But he isn’t a prophet. At least not a natural-born one, unlike Dorian. So even with all his magic, he can only get bits and pieces. When I died, I think he spent a long time trying to figure out if my being alive one more time would help him or hurt him. Then he decided to raise me.”

Kylar wondered about that. The Wolf had said Durzo’s resurrection was a mystery, a gift. Was he simply being modest, or did he really not know how Durzo had come back?

“Anyway, by the time the Wolf started working on me, my body had pretty much rotted away. So I feel like a new man.” He grinned, then stirred their little fire, watching the sparks.

“So this life is different, isn’t it?” Kylar asked.

“Sometimes to love is easy, but to accept love is hard. I used to always be the man who led the charge. The Devourer steals that. Tell me, what kind of man would put his eight-year-old daughter at the spear tip of a cavalry charge? A monster. But what kind of man would refuse to fight when his enemies threaten all he holds dear? That’s why I trained relentlessly. That’s why I became the perfect killer. Because every time I wasn’t good enough, I murdered someone I loved. I thought I finally defeated love when the ka’kari abandoned me, but then there you were in the tower, standing athwart fate and crying, No! I realized three things as your crazy ass dove into the river. First, you . . .  cared about me.”