Jarl nodded.
“So who’s been the puppet Shinga since Khalidor invaded?”
Jarl winced. “I, uh, haven’t exactly installed one.”
“Not exactly?” Brant arched a bushy gray eyebrow.
“Brant,” Momma K said. “A little gentler.”
Brant adjusted his arm in its sling, wincing. “Look at it from the street, Jarl. For more than a month, they’ve had no leader. Not just a bad leader. None. Gwinvere’s little government has been helping everyone and so far it’s going well, but your Sa’kagé thugs—sorry, people—have been in the same boat as everyone else. So why keep paying dues? Gwinvere was able to be a shadow Shinga, because there was never a threat like this. This is a war. You need an army. Armies need a leader. You need to be that leader, and you can’t do that from the shadows.”
“If I announce who I am, they’ll kill me.”
“They’ll try,” Brant said. “And they’ll succeed unless you can collect a core of competent people who are absolutely loyal to you. People willing to kill and to die for you.”
“These aren’t soldiers from good families who’ve been brought up on loyalty and duty and courage,” Jarl said. “We’re talking about thieves and prostitutes and pickpockets, people who only think about themselves and their own survival.”
“And that’s what they’ll say,” Momma K said so quietly Jarl barely heard her, “unless you see what they may be, and make them see it.”
“When I was a general, my best soldiers came from the Warrens,” Brant said. “They became the best because they had everything to gain.”
“So what exactly do you propose?” Jarl asked.
“I propose you work yourself out of a job,” Brant said. “Give your crooks a dream of a better life, a better way for their children, and a chance to see themselves as heroes, and you’ll have yourself an army.”
He paused to let it sink in, and soon Jarl’s heart was pounding, his mind racing. It was audacious. It was big. It was a chance to use power for more than just keeping power. He could see the outlines of a plan starting to fit together. His mind was already tapping what people he would place in which positions. Fragments of speeches were glomming together. Oh, it was seductive. Brant wasn’t just telling Jarl to give the crooks a dream; Brant was giving Jarl a dream. He could be a different type of Shinga. He could be noble. Revered. If he were successful, he could probably even become legitimate, be given real titles by whichever noble family he put back in power. Gods, it was seductive!
But it meant revealing himself. Committing himself. Right now, he was a secret. Everyone thought he was just a retired rent boy. Less than a dozen people knew he was the Shinga. If he wanted to, he could just stop communicating with them. If he didn’t try, he couldn’t fail.
“Jarl,” Momma K said, her voice gentle. “Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s a lie.”
He looked from one to the other of them, wondering how deeply they read him. Momma K probably read him to the core. It was scary. He should have suspected something just by her silence, but he couldn’t be angry with her. She’d had more patience with him than he deserved.
Work myself out of a job. Elene had said she couldn’t imagine Cenaria without the Sa’kagé polluting everything, but Jarl could. It would be a city where birth on the west side didn’t mean hopelessness, exploitation, time in the guilds, poverty, and death. He’d been lucky to get a job working for Momma K. The Warrens offered almost no honest jobs, certainly not for orphans. The Sa’kagé was fed directly from a self-renewing underclass of whores and thieves who abandoned their children as they themselves had been abandoned before. But it could be different, couldn’t it?
Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s a lie. They were suggesting he inject hope into the Warrens. “Fine,” Jarl said. “On one condition, Brant: if they kill me—whichever they it happens to be—I want you to write a poem for my funeral.”
“Agreed,” the general said, grinning, “and I’ll make it real emotional.”
16
Kylar sat on the bed in the darkness looking at Elene’s sleeping form. She was the kind of girl who just couldn’t stay up late, no matter how she tried. The sight of her filled him with such tenderness and wretchedness he could hardly bear it. Since she’d promised not to ask him to sell Retribution, she’d been true to her word. No surprise there, but she hadn’t even hinted.
He loved her. He wasn’t good enough for her.
He’d always believed that you became like those you spent your time with. Maybe that was part of it. He loved all the things about her that he wasn’t. Openness, purity, compassion. She was smiles and sunshine, and he belonged to the night. He wanted to be a good man, ached for it, but maybe some people were just born better than others.
After that first night, he’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t kill again. He would go out and train, but he wouldn’t kill. So he trained for nothing and honed abilities he’d sworn not to use. Training was a pale imitation of battle, but he would be satisfied with it.
His resolution held for six days, then he was down at the docks and found a pirate savagely beating a cabin boy. Kylar had only intended to separate them, but the pirate’s eyes demanded death. Retribution delivered it. On the seventh night, he’d been practicing simply hiding outside a midtown tavern, trying to avoid places that were likely to bring him across pimps or thieves or rapists or murderers. A man had passed by who ran a circle of child pickpockets—a tyrant who kept the children in line through sheer brutality. Retribution found the man’s heart before Kylar could stop himself On the eighth night, he’d been in the nobles’ district, hoping to find less violence there, when he heard a nobleman beating his mistress. The Night Angel came in invisibly and broke both the man’s arms.
Kylar held Retribution in his lap, looking at Elene. Every day, he promised himself he wouldn’t kill, not ever again, and he hadn’t killed for six nights. But part of him knew that was because he’d been lucky. The worst part of it was that he didn’t feel guilty for the murders. He’d felt awful every time he’d killed for Durzo. These kills did nothing. He felt guilty only for lying.
Maybe he was becoming a Hu Gibbet. Maybe he needed killing now. Maybe he was becoming a monster.
Each day he worked with Aunt Mea. Durzo had rarely praised Kylar, so he’d never realized how much he had learned from the old wetboy, but as Kylar spent hours with Aunt Mea, cataloguing her herbs, repackaging some of them so they would keep longer, throwing out those that had lost their potency, labeling the rest with dates and notes on their origins, he began to see how much he did know. He was nowhere near Durzo’s level of proficiency, but the man had had a few centuries on him.
He had to be careful, though. Aunt Mea used many herbs medicinally that he had used for poison. She had once set aside the roots of a silverleaf, saying they were too dangerous and that she could only use the leaves. Without thinking, he’d drawn up a chart of the lethal doses of the plant’s leaves, roots, and seeds by their various preparations, whether in a tincture, a powder, a paste, or a tea, cross-referenced by body weight, sex, and age of the—he almost wrote of the “deader,” and only changed it to “patient” at the last second. When he looked up, Aunt Mea was staring at him.