“Fair enough.” Two weeks. So the water clock was grinding away. Good. Gaelan liked to feel the press of time. It had been too long.
Like most of the wetboys, Polus Merit worshipped Nysos, the god of blood, semen, and wine. He was already half drunk when Gaelan ran into him in the brothel. He was a big man, fatter than you’d expect a wetboy to be. But then, his specialty was poisons. And claymores.
Another product of the Death Games. He’d been an apothecary who got too far into debt to the wrong people and had been forced into slavery, along with his wife and children. They hadn’t made it—Gaelan knew no more than that, and didn’t want to. When Polus had been pushed into the Death Games, no one thought he’d last a day. But he’d taken to it with relish. Now, he was forty-five, bald, paunchy. Still powerful under the fat, and with a massive Talent.
He took a deep drink of a Sethi red, looked down the bar at Gaelan. “You’ve got a dangerous look about you,” Polus said.
“Bugger off. You’re not my type,” Gaelan said. He had seen the man’s eyes. There was murder-guilt there. It was enough.
Polus scooted to a seat closer to Gaelan. “You know how other gifts sometimes come along with the Talent?”
“Hey, fuck off.”
“I got a bit of prophecy. Not enough to be useful, you know. Just glimpses. My wife dead, things like that to keep me up late at night. I had this vision that I was going to be killed by forty men, all at once. Queer, huh? But now that you’re here, I see they’re just you. Durzo Blint.”
What? That wasn’t a name Gaelan had ever had. It wasn’t a name he’d ever even heard.
Polus Merit chuckled quietly, drunkenly. “Don’t suppose I could stop you. You know, it’s foretold now and all.” He grinned. “Worse times to go, I guess. My favorite girl was working tonight. She did me right. This wine could have been better, but, meh.” Polus shrugged, pulled out his coin purse, put it on the bar and waved to the server, a woman in a low-cut drees. “See this all gets to Anesha, would you?”
“You drunk, Polus?” the server asked.
He smiled at her. Shook his head.
When she left, Polus turned back to Gaelan. “I don’t ask you to make it fair. Gods know I don’t deserve that. But I’d appreciate it if you make it quick.”
Gaelan looked at him like he was crazy. But he felt transfixed. A talent in prophecy. If the man started shouting everything he saw, Gaelan could be wrecked instantly. Forty men in one. Who could that be but an immortal?
“I’m going to go for a walk,” Polus said. “Down along the river.” He got up.
After the man left, Gaelan went out the back way quickly, in case Polus was setting up an ambush in front or in back. The man wasn’t there. Gaelan made it up to the rooftops, jumping from wall to wall. He strung his long bow and checked his arrows.
True to his word, Polus Merit was walking slowly, not two blocks away, along the edge of the Plith. A quiet section where it would be easy to dispose of the body. A hundred paces away.
~ You’re better than this. This isn’t you, Acaelus. ~
It is now. Half a breath out, the blessed stillness before murder.
He released the arrow. Perfect shot, base of the skull. Instant death. Polus crumpled.
When he went to roll the body into the river, Gaelan found a note in Polus’s hand. It had just two words: “Thank you.”
Nigh unto seven centuries ago, there was a magical conflagration at the Fall of Trayethell, the Battle of the Black Barrow. Magic to blot out the sun, to rend the earth. Magic seen two hundred leagues away, and felt across the oceans.
It was said that on that last day, having lost friends, wife, and battle, and hope, the Emperor Jorsin Alkestes took up the two greatest magical artifacts ever made or found. He was the first and only man ever to hold both at once. With them, his magical abilities, already legendary, were amplified a thousandfold. He took in all the power of Iures and Curoch—and it killed him.
But it didn’t kill him alone.
“What do you know of the ka’kari?” I ask Yvor Vas, draining my fourth ale.
“I know about them,” the freckled idiot says. “Otherwise why would I be talking with you? And you know everything about them, so why are you asking?”
“I know what I know. What I don’t know is what you think you know. And if you use that tone again, you’ll be picking it up from the floor.”
“What tone?” Yvor asks, petulant.
My fist crosses the boy’s jaw. He flies off his stool and lands flat on the floor. Most satisfying.
“That tone,” I say.
“You broke my fucking tooth!” the boy complains. His lips are bleeding.
“My knuckles, on the other hand, are pristine. Odd.”
Hot, barely restrained rage flares in his eyes. The boy picks himself up and takes a moment to master his anger. I watch his eyes closely. Finally, he says, “There were six ka’kari. One for each of Emperor Jorsin Alkestes’ Champions of Light. They were created by Jorsin’s archmage, Ezra, during the Battle of Black Barrow. The Society of the Second Sun believes they confer immortality—the bearers of the ka’kari can still be killed, but if not killed, you live forever. Maybe not forever, but at least seven hundred years, which seems close enough to me. Most in the Society believe that you were originally Shrad Marden, bearer of the blue ka’kari, friend of Jorsin Alkestes.”
Friend? Did you have friends, Jorsin? I thought I was one, but now I’m not so sure. “And you? What do you believe?”
“I think you were and are Eric Daadrul, the bearer of the silver ka’kari. Impervious to blades and able to form them in your hands by thought alone.”
“There’s a small rumor that Polus Merit might be dead,” Gwinvere Kirena said. “Something about him giving a fortune to one of my girls.” They were in one of her houses, in a small, well-appointed library. She was wearing a casual blue dress that still managed to accentuate her curves.
“Can you hush it up?” Gaelan asked.
“This is the kind of thing that can get worse if you try to quash it. Wetboys frequently disappear for weeks at a time. Sometimes they give money to their favorite rent girl in case they don’t come back. It doesn’t mean anything yet. I don’t know the girl well enough to lean on her and be completely sure what she’d do. So I’d say we have four nights.”
“Who’s next?” Gaelan asked.
“Saron and Jade Marion.”
“Two at once? Siblings?”
“Husband and wife. More than a little crazy.”
“Anyone who chooses this work is crazy,” Gaelan said.
“They have a seven-year-old son.”
“So I’m making an orphan. Fantastic.”
“They’re already teaching him the business. Crazy.”
“Oh, so now I’m doing him a favor?” Gaelan asked.
“In this life, some people are finished before they begin, Gaelan.”
“You’ll take care of him.”
Her eyebrows lifted. First you were worried for him, now you want me to kill him?
“I mean, provide for him,” Gaelan said. “You’re not going to put him on the street. He gets a chance. Small as it may be.”