Shadow's Edge

He didn’t go out the door and walk down the stairs. No, not tonight. Instead, he opened the window. The air smelled good. Free. He sucked a great breath deep into his lungs and held it as if he could trap that freedom within him. At the irony of the thought, he let it out all at once and looked at her.

“Just what I always do, love,” Kylar said. “I’m fucking it up.” With a surge of his Talent, he leapt out into the night.

Ferl Khalius had been given the shit duty again. After his unit had been slaughtered during the invasion, he’d been picked for every bad assignment: throwing bodies off that rickety half-burnt bridge; helping the cooks move supplies into the castle; helping the meisters build the Godking’s new wall around the city; double and triple guard duties—and never a choice assignment like on the Vanden Bridge where the guards took a week’s pay home in bribes every shift just for letting a few crooks across. Now this.

He looked at his prisoner with disgust. The man was fat, with the soft hands of a southron noble, though he wore his red beard in the Khalidoran fashion. His nose was crooked and his eyebrows looked like brushes. He stared at Ferl with obvious anxiety.

Ferl wasn’t supposed to talk to him. Ferl wasn’t supposed to know who he was. But from the first, he’d had a bad feeling about this, ever since a captain had told him the Vürdmeisters wanted to see him. They’d requested him by name. He was to report immediately.

That was something no Khalidoran wanted to hear. Ferl thought it was about his little souvenir, the dragon-hilted sword he’d taken from the bridge. But that hadn’t been why they’d wanted him, though he’d nearly wet himself when he saw he was speaking with the Lodricari Vürdmeister Neph Dada himself. No Vürdmeister was normal, but Neph was spooky even for a Vürdmeister. Ferl had stared at the twelve knotted cords representing the shu’ras Neph had mastered for the entire time Neph spoke. It was too scary to look at his face.

Neph had given Ferl and Ferl alone this assignment. He was forbidden to speak about it with other soldiers, forbidden to even associate with them for the duration of the assignment. He and the noble were confined to some tradesman’s house on the east side. Meisters had hastily made part of the house a prison. Meisters had done the work. There was only one reason for that: this was so important it had to be done instantly and without anyone’s knowledge. Then they’d left him with enough food for several months and forbidden him to leave.

That left everything feeling wrong. Ferl Khalius hadn’t become second—now first—in his warband by being stupid. He’d spoken with the noble and learned his name was Baron Kirof. The baron claimed not to know why he had been imprisoned. He protested his innocence and loyalty to Khalidor—and the fact he wasted his breath telling a mere soldier told Ferl that Baron Kirof wasn’t very bright.

Disobeying his orders, Ferl snuck away and found out that Baron Kirof had supposedly been murdered. The good Khalidoran duke, Tenser Vargun, was now rotting in the Maw for having killed a Cenarian noble who wasn’t dead.

That’s when Ferl knew he was screwed. His imagination couldn’t paint any picture in which things turned out well for Ferl Khalius. Why would you assign a man without a unit to this? Because you could kill him and no one would notice. When the time came, Baron Kirof would be released or killed—the only reason to keep him alive when he was supposed to be dead had to be so they could produce him at some point. But Ferl? Ferl would just be evidence that the Vürdmeisters were lying.

I should have gone back to Khalidor. He’d been offered a job tending the oxen of the baggage train. He’d almost taken it. If he had, he might be on his way back to his clan by now. But everyone who escorted the treasure to Khalidor was thoroughly searched before they were released, and that would mean losing his precious sword. So he’d stayed, sure he could pick up a small fortune while they sacked the city. Right.

“I should kill you,” Ferl said. “I should kill you just to spite them.”

The fat man turned a paler shade. He could tell that Ferl meant it.

“Tell me, fatty,” Ferl said. “If the Vürdmeisters told you that you could live if you lied about who kidnapped you, would you do it?”

“What kind of stupid question is that?” Baron Kirof asked.

So they’d known Kirof would play along. “You’re a brave man, aren’t you, fatty?”

“What?” Baron Kirof asked. “I can’t understand your accent. Why do you keep calling me forty?”

“Fatty. Fatty!”

“I’m not forty. I’m thirty-six.”

Ferl’s hand darted through the bars and he grabbed a handful of the baron’s blubber and squeezed it as hard as he could. Baron Kirof’s eyes widened and he squealed and tried to pull away, but Ferl held him against the bars by his fat. “Fatty! Fatty!” he said. He grabbed the baron’s cheek and squeezed it with his other hand. The man flailed, trying to knock Ferl’s hands away, but he was too weak. He wailed. “Fatty!” Ferl yelled in his face. Then he released him.

The baron dropped back in his cell onto his bed and rubbed his cheek and his love handle, his eyes misty with tears. “Fatty?” he asked, wounded.

Ferl was lucky he didn’t have a spear on hand. “Get your fat ass moving,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

13

Just moving, leaping from roof to roof, flying over the world below, filled Kylar’s heart with joy. Cenaria’s buildings had been a mix of Ceuran-style rice fiber and bamboo houses with steep clay-shingled roofs and red brick and wood homes with thatch. It was rarely possible to move from roof to roof. Here, hundreds of miles from the nearest rice paddy and without the threat of snow, all the roofs were flat and solid clay, supported with good wood. For a man of Kylar’s talents, they made a highway in the air.

Kylar reveled in it. He reveled in the strength of his muscles, reveled in the way the night air tasted and the secret power of moving through the night as a shadow. Everything was right. Nothing fit like his wetboy grays. Designed by Cenaria’s best tailor, Master Piccun, they moved with him. The mottled colors broke up his silhouette and would have made even a man without Talent difficult to see.

He paused at the edge of a building, rolling his neck, and limbering up his back as he scooted back. The gap to the warehouse roof was a good twenty feet wide. He blew out a breath, and ran. His steps made scritching noises as he sprinted toward the edge. He leapt and his legs kept pumping as if he were running on air as he flew over the alley. He cleared the warehouse roof easily, landing six feet in.

He hurtled straight at a wall where the part of the roof rose to a smaller third story. It was too high for him to jump and grab the edge. Instead, he ran up the wall as far as he could and then vaulted off it. He reached for the roof beams that extended out of the building, but he missed. His fingers were half a foot below the bottom of the beam.

Phantom hands whooshed out from his hands, extending his reach, and pulled the beam into his grasp. Kylar flipped up and landed on the top of the three-inch-wide beam. He wobbled for a moment, then steadied himself and stepped onto the roof.

He pumped his arm and whooped. It had only taken him three tries. Not bad. Not bad at all. Next time he’d try it while invisible. He was beginning to understand what his master had told him once about how much he would have to learn once he could use his Talent. Just shifting from using his Talent to leap to using it to extend the phantom hands was almost more than he could manage. Doing that while invisible and running full speed—well, he had nothing but time to train, did he?