Regnus nodded unhappily, obviously knowing he held hundreds or thousands of lives in his hands, not knowing he held his own as well. If he plots rebellion, I’ll kill him now, I swear by the Night Angels. I serve only the Sa’kagé now. And myself. Always myself.
“May generations unborn forgive me,” Regnus Gyre said, tears gleaming in his eyes. “But I will not commit murder for what may be, Brant. I cannot. I will swear fealty.”
The wetboy slid the daggers back into their sheaths, ignoring the twin feelings of relief and despair he felt.
It’s that damned woman. She’s ruined me. She’s ruined everything.
Blint saw the ambush from fifty paces away, and walked right into its teeth. The sun was still an hour from rising and the only people on the twisting streets of the Warrens were merchants who’d fallen asleep where they shouldn’t have and were hurrying home to their wives.
The guild—Black Dragon from the guild glyphs he’d passed—was hiding around a narrow choke point in the alley where guild rats could spring up to clog both ends of the street and also attack from the low rooftops.
He had affected a bad right knee and pulled his cloak tight around his shoulders, the hood pulled low over his face. As he limped into the trap, one of the older children, a big as they called them, jumped into the alley ahead of him and whistled, brandishing a rusty saber. Guild rats surrounded the wetboy.
“Clever,” Durzo said. “You keep a lookout before dawn when most of the other guilds are sleeping, and you’re able to jump a few bags who’ve been out all night whoring. They don’t want to explain any bruises from fighting to their wives, so they hand over their coins. Not bad. Whose idea was that?”
“Azoth’s,” a big said, pointing past the wetboy.
“Shut up, Roth!” the guild head said.
The wetboy looked at the small boy on the rooftop. He was holding a rock aloft, his pale blue eyes intent, ready. He looked familiar. “Oh, now you’ve given him away,” Durzo said.
“You shut up, too!” the guild head said, shaking the saber at him. “Hand over your purse or we’ll kill you.”
“Ja’laliel,” a black guild rat said, “he called them ‘bags.’ A merchant wouldn’t know we call ’em that. He’s Sa’kagé.”
“Shut up, Jarl! We need this.” Ja’laliel coughed and spat blood. “Just give us your—”
“I don’t have the time for this. Move,” Durzo said.
“Hand it—”
The wetboy darted forward, his left hand twisting Ja’laliel’s sword hand, snatching the saber, and his body spinning in. His right elbow cracked against the guild head’s temple, but he pulled the blow so it wouldn’t kill.
The fight was over by the time the guild rats flinched.
“I said I don’t have time for this,” Durzo said. He threw back his hood.
He knew he was nothing special to look at. He was lanky and sharp-featured, with dark blond hair and a wispy blond beard over lightly pockmarked cheeks. But he might have had three heads from the way the children shrank back.
“Durzo Blint,” Roth murmured.
Rocks rattled to the ground.
“Durzo Blint,” the name passed through the guild rats in waves. He saw fear and awe in their eyes. They’d just tried to mug a legend.
He smirked. “Sharpen this. Only an amateur lets his blade rust.” He threw the saber into a gutter clotted with sewage. Then he walked through the mob. They scattered as if he might kill them all.
Azoth watched him stride into the early morning mists, disappearing like so many other hopes into the sinkhole of the Warrens. Durzo Blint was everything Azoth wasn’t. He was powerful, dangerous, confident, fearless. He was like a god. He’d looked at the whole guild arrayed against him—even the bigs like Roth and Ja’laliel and Rat—and he’d been amused. Amused! Someday, Azoth swore. He didn’t quite dare even think the whole thought, lest Blint sense his presumption, but his whole body yearned for it. Someday.
When Blint was far enough away not to notice, Azoth followed.
4
The bashers guarding the Nine’s subterranean chamber eyed Durzo sourly. They were twins and two of the biggest men in the Sa’kagé. Each had a lightning bolt tattooed down his forehead.
“Weapons?” one said.
“Lefty,” Durzo said in greeting, removing his sword, three daggers, the darts strapped to his wrist, and a number of small glass balls from his other arm.
“I’m Lefty,” the other one said, patting down Blint vigorously.
“You mind?” Durzo asked. “We both know if I wanted to kill anyone in there I could, with or without weapons.”
Lefty flushed. “Why don’t I ram this pretty sword—”
“What Lefty means is, why don’t you pretend not to be a threat, and we’ll pretend we’re the reason,” Bernerd said. “It’s just a formality, Blint. Like asking someone how they are when you don’t care.”
“I don’t ask.”
“I was sorry to hear about Vonda,” Bernerd said. Durzo stopped cold, a lance twisting through his guts. “Really,” the big man said. He held the door open. Glanced at his brother.
Part of Durzo knew he should say something cutting or threatening or funny, but his tongue was leaden.
“Um, Master Blint?” Bernerd said. Recovering, Durzo stepped into the Nine’s meeting room without raising his eyes.
It was a place to inspire fear. Carved from black fireglass, a platform dominated the room. Nine chairs sat on the platform. A tenth chair sat above them like a throne. There was only bare floor facing the chairs. Those the Nine interviewed would stand.
The chamber was a tight rectangle, but it was deep. The ceiling was so high it disappeared in the darkness. It gave those questioned the feeling of being interrogated in hell. That the chairs, walls, and even the floor were carved with little gargoyles, dragons, and people, all screaming, did nothing to cool the effect.
But Durzo walked in with an easy familiarity. The night held no terrors for him. The shadows welcomed his eyes, hid nothing from him. At least that much is left me.
The Nine had their cowls on, except for Momma K, though most knew there was no hiding their identities from Durzo. Above them, the Shinga, Pon Dradin, sat in his throne. He was as still and silent as usual.
“Ith the wife dead?” Corbin Fishill asked. He was a fashionable, handsome man with a reputation for cruelty, especially toward those children in the guilds he managed. The laughter his lisp might have provoked somehow dried up under the ever-present malice on his face.
“Things aren’t as you expected,” Durzo said. He gave his report briefly. The king would soon die, and the men whom the Sa’kagé had feared would try to succeed him would not press their claim. That left the throne to Aleine Gunder, who was too weak to dare interfere with the Sa’kagé.
“I would suggest,” Durzo said, “that we make the prince promote General Agon to lord general. Agon would keep the prince from consolidating his power, and if Khalidor makes any move—”
The tiny former slave master interrupted, “While we acknowledge your …complaint against Khalidor, Master Blint, we aren’t to squander our political capital on some general.”
“We don’t have to,” Momma K said. The Mistress of Pleasures was still beautiful, though it had been years since she was the city’s most celebrated courtesan. “We can get what we want by pretending someone else asked for it.” Everyone stopped and listened. “The prince was willing to buy off the general with a political marriage. So we tell him that Agon’s price is a political appointment instead. The general won’t ever know, and the prince isn’t likely to ask about it.”
“And that gives us leverage to reopen the slavery issue,” the slave master said.
“I’ll be damned if we turn slavers again,” another said. He was a big man gone to fat, with heavy jowls, small eyes, and scarred fists befitting the master of the Sa’kagé’s bashers.