Nothing happened. Oh, shit. He practically dived behind Jarl’s desk.
“Sir?” the bodyguard asked Jarl, not seeing Kylar through the crack of the door he had opened.
“Uh, show him in,” Jarl said.
The door closed and soon opened once more. Kylar didn’t dare to look. If he exposed enough of his face to be able to see Durzo, Durzo would see him.
“I won’t waste your time or mine,” Kylar heard Durzo say. Steps whisked softly across the floor and the desk groaned as someone sat on it. “I know you’re Kylar’s friend,” Durzo said, only inches above Kylar.
Jarl made a sound of acknowledgment.
“I want you to get a message to him as soon as possible. I already sent him the message, but I need to make sure he gets it. Tell him I must speak with him. I’ll be at the Tipsy Tart. I’ll be there for the next two hours. Tell him it’s arutayro.”
“Spell that,” Jarl said, moving to his desk and grabbing a quill from the inkpot.
Durzo spelled it, and then Jarl made a strangled sound of protest as Durzo must have grabbed him.
“Get it to him fast, rent boy. It’s important. I’ll hold you responsible if he doesn’t get it.” The desk protested again as Durzo got off it and walked out.
After the door closed, Kylar crawled out from under the desk.
Jarl’s eyes widened. “You were under the desk?”
“Can’t always be fancy.”
Jarl shook his head. “You’re unbelievable.” As he wadded up the paper that had his note on it, he said, “What does arutayro mean?”
“Bloodless. It means we don’t kill each other while we’re meeting.”
“And you trust him? After you tried to kill him last night?”
“Blint will kill me, but he’ll do it professionally. He thinks I deserve that much. Mind if I use your window? I have a lot to do before I see him.”
“Help yourself.”
Kylar threw open the window, then turned to his friend. “I’m sorry. I had to try. I have to kill her and you were the fastest way to find her.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help.”
Crawling out the window, Kylar moved out of Jarl’s line of sight, then tried to draw the shadows again. This time it worked easily. Perfect. He couldn’t even tell what he had done differently from what he did in the office.
By the Night Angels. Kylar figured that learning to control his Talent would have been hard enough if he had Durzo to explain it to him. Figuring it out on his own would be well-nigh impossible.
He moved back to the window. After a minute, Jarl checked the window, then walked to his desk and scrawled a quick note. He summoned a boy to his office and handed him the note.
Kylar circled around the building, and followed the boy after he came out a side door. He’d known Jarl wouldn’t tell him—and he hoped his friend never figured out that Kylar had used him anyway.
The messenger boys were of uneven quality. Some of them made their passes so well that Kylar could barely follow them. Others simply held the letter out to the next boy.
It took a half hour for them to get to a small house on the east side. Kylar recognized the guard who took the message from the last boy. He was a Ymmuri with almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair. Kylar had seen the man at Momma K’s house before. It was good enough. Momma K was here. Kylar would deal with her later.
He headed to the Tipsy Tart.
Durzo Blint was seated against a wall, with a wrapped bundle on the table. Kylar joined him, removed the sash from his waist, and set each of his weapons in it: the dagger and wakizashi that had been tucked into the sash, the Ceuran hand-and-a-half sword across his back, two daggers from his sleeves, throwing knives and darts from his waistband, and a tanto from one boot.
“That all?” Blint asked sardonically.
Kylar rolled up the sash and set it beside Blint’s, which was just as large. “Looks like we’ll both be working soon.”
Blint nodded and set down mug of a foul Ladeshian stout exactly in the center of a board so that it didn’t cross any of the cracks.
“You wanted to speak with me?” Kylar said, wondering why Blint was drinking. Blint never drank when he had to work.
“They have my daughter. They made threats. Credible threats. This Roth is a real twist.”
“They’ll kill her if you don’t give them the ka’kari,” Kylar guessed.
Blint only drank in response.
“So you have to kill me,” Kylar said.
Blint stared him in the eye. It was a yes.
“Is it just the job, or did I fail?” Kylar asked, butterflies roaring in his stomach.
“Fail?” Blint looked up from the stout, snorted. “A lot of wetboys go through what we call the Crucible. Sometimes it’s designed deliberately for journeymen wetboys who have some serious problem—anything that hinders a gifted apprentice from becoming a gifted wetboy. Sometimes, it happens to a wetboy after he’s a master. It’s one of the reasons there are so few old wetboys.
“My Crucible was Vonda, Gwinvere’s little sister. We thought we were in love. We thought certain realities didn’t apply to us. I became a wetboy with an obvious weakness and Garoth Ursuul kidnapped her. He was looking for a ka’kari, as he still is. So was I.”
“I don’t know what-all it does. I can’t even use my Talent all the time. Can I use the ka’kari when I don’t even have it in my possession?”
“Stop interrupting. This story has a point, and you should know better than to expect me to give you a tutorial on the very day I’m going to have to kill you,” Durzo said. “Suffice it to say that the power of a ka’kari is vast. I’d been working for years to get one. Garoth Ursuul had been doing the same. He thought a ka’kari would give him an edge over the princes and the Vürdmeisters so he could become Godking. So he took Vonda and told me where he was holding her, and told me that if I went for the ka’kari, he’d kill her.”
“You’ve never done well with threats,” Kylar said.
“I think I’ve always done well with them,” Durzo said. “The thing was, there was going to be a limited time to get the ka’kari. The man who’d allegedly bonded the ka’kari was on his death bed, so the time to get it would be immediately after he died. Naturally, Garoth had Vonda held way outside of town. I knew that the Sa’kagé was going to poison the man that night. I guessed that Garoth knew it too. I couldn’t be two places at once, so I had to make a choice.
“I knew Garoth Ursuul. He’s a master of traps. He’s smarter than I am. More devious. So I guessed that if I went for Vonda, either the traps or meisters of his would kill me. I knew of one trap he’d used before that would use my entrance as a trap’s trigger that would kill her. That was like him, turning my attempt to save Vonda into the very thing that killed her. Getting the ka’kari would just make a sweet deal sweeter for him. That was my Crucible, Kylar. Would I fling myself into a trap in an attempt to be a hero, or would I use my mind, give up Vonda for lost, and get the ka’kari?”
“You chose the ka’kari.”
“It was a fake.” Durzo studied the tabletop, and his voice shook. “Afterward, I sprinted, stole a horse, ran it to death, but it was half an hour after dawn when I got to the house where Vonda was. She was dead. I checked all the windows, but couldn’t find any sign of traps. I’ll never know if it’s because he had someone remove them, or if they were purely magical, or if they were never trapped at all. The bastard. He did it on purpose.” Blint took a long pull from his stout. “I’m a wetboy, and love is a noose. The only way to redeem my choice was to become the best wetboy ever.”
Kylar felt a lump in his throat.
“That’s why we can’t have love, Kylar. That’s why I did everything I could to keep you out of it. I made one mistake, let myself be weak one time, and now after all these years, it’s come back to haunt me. You’re not going to die because you failed, Kylar. You’ll die because I did. That’s the way things work. Others always pay for my failures. I failed, Kylar, because I thought you only go through the Crucible once. I was wrong. Life is the crucible.”