Night Angel Nemesis

Book 1: The Kylar Chronicles

by Brent Weeks

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure

Synopsis

The incredible return to the New York Times bestselling world of the Night Angel, where master assassin Kylar Stern embarks on a new adventure as the High King Logan Gyre calls on him to save his kingdom and the hope of peace.

"Weeks has been showing other fantasy authors how it's done for over fifteen years." — Peter V. Brett, author of The Desert Prince

"Weeks is a giant of the genre." — Nicholas Eames, author of Kings of the Wyld

After the war that cost him so much, Kylar Stern is broken and alone. He's determined not to kill again, but an impending amnesty will pardon the one murderer he can't let walk free. He promises himself this is the last time. One last hit to tie up the loose ends of his old, lost life.

But Kylar's best — and maybe only — friend, the High King Logan Gyre, needs him. To protect a fragile peace, Logan’s new kingdom, and the king’s twin sons, he needs Kylar to secure a powerful magical artifact that was unearthed during the war.

With rumors that a ka'kari may be found, adversaries both old and new are on the hunt. And if Kylar has learned anything, it’s that ancient magics are better left in the hands of those he can trust.

If he does the job right, he won’t need to kill at all. This isn’t an assassination — it’s a heist.

But some jobs are too hard for an easy conscience, and some enemies are so powerful the only answer lies in the shadows.

"Weeks writes in an inescapably engaging style. Breathlessly high stakes, terrible missteps, and unexpected revelations keep the story humming along at a breakneck pace." — Andrea Stewart, author of The Bone Shard Daughter

For more from Brent Weeks, check out:

The Ka'kari Codex

The Night Angel Trilogy
The Way of Shadows
Shadow's Edge
Beyond the Shadows

The Kylar Chronicles
Night Angel Nemesis

The Night Angel Trilogy: 10th Anniversary Edition

Night Angel: The Complete Trilogy (omnibus)

Perfect Shadow: A Night Angel Novella
The Way of Shadows: The Graphic Novel

Lightbringer
The Black Prism
The Blinding Knife
The Broken Eye
The Blood Mirror
The Burning White

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 592

Sample

He’s young and likely innocent and I wish it made a difference. If he doesn’t move in the next three minutes, this kid has to die.

Most people don’t understand my work: They think murder is the hard part.

In the beginning, maybe—when you’re fourteen years old, hiding under a bed, breath loud, knuckles white on the steel, eyes hot with tomorrow’s tears, footsteps approaching.

But even then the hard part wasn’t the destined dead; the hard part was the living. They never follow the plan. The living always crowd forward, treading on the heels of those fated to die, as if when they meet Death, they’ll nod a greeting and pass on by.

My first time, it was a castle maid, coming to check on her worthless lover I’d been sent to kill. He was leaving her; instead she joined him in eternity. My first murder of an innocent.

Now it’s this kid.

What’s a kid doing out playing ball at this hour? Why’s he got to be here?

From my perch I feel as if he’s a thousand paces away, tiny across the chasm of experience, and I alone atop a cliff—though he’s merely on the ground, and I on a rooftop across the alley.

He has a few rocks set out to show the width of the goal. As I watch, he spins around an imaginary defender, bounces the ball once, then kicks it against the compound’s wall.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-chunk

Over and over. He puts his hands up and makes a sound like a crowd roaring its approval. Young kid, twelve maybe, all stupidity and big dreams. Maybe he thinks he’s found his one way out of these slums.

~Remind you of anyone?~

I ignore the ka’kari speaking in my head. If it weren’t so helpful when it wants to be, I’d throw the damned thing as far away from me as I could.

Twilight is a burning fuse, and soon the sun will explode merciless on the horizon, revealing all I’ve done or left undone. But still I wait, hoping I’ll find some third way.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-chunk

He’s just a kid.

But he’s not giving up his practicing.

Knowing what it may mean, am I really going to do this?

Yes, yes I am. She’s worth it. They deserve justice.

All right, that’s it. Morning’s coming. Time’s up for both of us.

I move, dropping silently from the roof into the deeper shadows of the alley.

ka-tunk, ka-tunk, ker-

Streaking in from nowhere, I snag the ball out of the air. Left-handed, no less. Maybe I missed my calling. I could’ve been a streetball great.

The kid’s jaw drops and his eyes go ridiculously wide at the sight of me. It’s a bit satisfying, in that I-feel-proud-that-I-can-scare-children sort of way. Is this one of those dark pleasures of power Count Drake tried to warn me about? I haven’t dressed to impress. Tonight—this morning technically—I’m in my mottled black-and-grays with a hood and face mask, an unstrung bow tucked away and a black short sword in a tension-release back scabbard.

~There’s something interesting about the ball.~

I look at it. It’s leather over a goat-belly air bladder, stitched into nearly a perfect sphere. Kids in this neighborhood usually make do with a wad of rags and twine.

“I’m gonna ask you a favor, kid,” I growl. “My business isn’t with you. So I’m asking you to leave. Quietly. Please. You understand? There’s a man out tonight who’d kill a child.”

I pause long enough for him to wonder whether I mean myself or the dirtbag noble who lives in the compound beyond this wall.

Lives, but maybe I’ll remedy that.

“He give you this?” I ask, spinning the ball on one finger, then another. “Lord Repha’im?”

The kid can’t even nod yes, frozen, but I know I’m right. Such gifts are a cheap way for a man to buy loyalty in a slum like this.

“You’re the Night Angel,” the kid chokes out. “You’re Kylar Stern.”

The ball’s spinning slows, stops, but it stays poised on my fingertip.

They know I’m back in the city. Lord Repha’im knows I’m coming. That explains the magical traps twisting in the air above his walls, keeping me from simply climbing over them. And if this kid knows about me…

“You work for him,” I say, taking the ball in hand. “That’s why you’re out here at this hour. You’re a lookout.”

~Ah. This makes things more complicated.~

I thought by showing myself, I might scare him away, that I could give myself an excuse to spare him. But as a lookout, he’s too dangerous for that, isn’t he?

He gulps again, but then his eyes dart greedily back to his ball. He should be running away right now, but I have his treasure, and he can’t bear to leave it behind. His life, for a stupid ball.

“Kid, what do you call an innocent who helps bad people, even if only a little? What do you call an innocent who gets other innocent people killed?”

He doesn’t answer. And still doesn’t run.

~I have a better question. What do you call that innocent, Kylar?~

Today? Today I call him an acceptable loss.

The lines get blurry. But that’s what this work is. It’s why I hate it, almost as much as I love it.

“They’ve given you some sort of signal,” I say. “A flare or something, if you see me? I’ll be straight with you. You give them that signal, you die.”

He blanches, but his eyes flick to his ball again. His treasure.

If I have to kill him, the world won’t be losing one of its great minds.

“Kid, I have so much power that it scares me. Power so big it needs bounds. I could become worse than the men I’ve killed. Maybe I already have. But I’m trying here. Trying to be good, you understand? So I’ve been working on some rules for myself. Trying them out, anyway. Here’s one: Never let anyone see my face, or they have to die.”

If I let him walk, he’ll think my attention has shifted away from him and onto infiltrating the estate. Then he might come back and warn them. But if he runs away, I can draw my blade and chase. He’ll have no idea how long I keep coming after him. He probably won’t stop running until noon.

I pull my mask off. “What do you think?” I say.

He squeaks but doesn’t break. Tough kid. Or maybe just that dumb.

“I know what it’s like, kid, working for these kinds of people. I’ve been there. Here, actually. I grew up not far from here, in a part of the Warrens that makes this place look soft. The streets don’t give most kids a chance. I know that. Hate it. So with me everyone gets a chance. One. One chance. Then my judgment is final. I offer mercy first, if I can, then I bring justice, ruthless and red.”

He’s not running away, not taking the out I’m trying to offer him. Which means I’m going to have to send another body bobbing white down the sour sludge-brown river.

Unless…

A glimmer of it comes to me. My third way. Maybe.

I turn and kick the ball at the goal. I narrowly miss. Dammit. I’m not my master yet. But it does bounce back to the kid, who scoops up his little treasure convulsively.

Facing the wall and the brightening sky, as I put my mask back on against the stench of the river and slums, I ask quietly, “So tell me, what do you choose?”

There’s no response but the quiet scritch of fleeing feet on cobblestones. The kid is gone. Finally.

I draw blades, snarl, and run after him. He throws a look back as he rounds a corner, his face blanched, eyes wide, stumbling on trash spilling out of an alley. With him in full flight, I stow my weapons, pull the shadows about me, and pursue him on the silent feet of a nightmare.

I have a poison. Knocks out a grown man. I could use it on the kid, scaling the dose down for his weight. But there’s a chance it’ll kill him. You just can’t tell.

In wet work, a mistake can mean a dead kid. If you can’t deal with that, you’re in the wrong line of work.

After a couple of quick turns, the kid heads down a street parallel to the estate, and I start to think he’s wised up and is running home. Then he slips into a space between a dilapidated shop and the compound’s pristine wall. There, amid rotting wood and crumbling mortar, he disappears.

My chest tightens.

I find the hole only by the sound of his trousers scuffing along the ground as he crawls. I follow.

The tunnel stinks of dander and cat piss. Unpleasant as it is, it’s a good sign. If it were clean, I’d know adults had built and maintained it. Nonetheless, here I take it slow. Not from claustrophobia. Tight spaces only terrify if they also make you feel powerless, and when I was little, tight spaces kept me safe from the older kids. Nor does a fear of the oppressive dark slow me. Since I bonded the black ka’kari, darkness welcomes my eyes.

No, here is where I’d set the real trap, if I were hunting me.

The big trap I’m currently avoiding by entering the estate this way is directly in and above the walls of the compound. Hanging invisible in the air is some kind of magical snare that appears to be the work of at least three different magi. Two of them were subtle. The third is a fire mage.

Fire mages don’t tend to be good at subtle.

I don’t know what the invisible hooks and bars and switches above the walls do—I’m no mage myself—but I know when you see a bear trap, you don’t test it by sticking your foot in.

The ball, I realize.

There was magic on the ball, wasn’t there? I ask the ka’kari. Why didn’t you tell me?

~You’re a big boy now, Kylar. I’m not going to spell everything out for you.~

That’s what was strange about the ball, not only that it was too expensive for a street kid—the ball itself was the lookout’s warning flare. He was probably supposed to throw it over the wall if he saw me.

I push through the tight tunnel as fast as I dare. Then I pause at its exit in the lee of a large rock that leans against an outbuilding, the hole itself overgrown with long grasses. The exit’s too small for an adult to pass. Even the kid had barely made it through.

That’s the good news. It means this isn’t the manor’s emergency exit. It means Lord Repha’im may not know it exists.

The bad news is that the estate’s dogs aren’t ignorant about this hole, and every last one of them seems to have used this corner to mark its territory and empty its bowels.

I hear a distant pounding on a door, and the kid’s voice raised, shouting.

I need to hurry.

I scrape at the hard earth with my bare hands, widening the exit. The ka’kari could help me with this, but it doesn’t, and I don’t beg it to. The ka’kari’s magic could also blunt the smell of the fresh dog crap the kid stepped in and smeared everywhere as he scrambled out of the tunnel—but again, it doesn’t.

Why is it always sewers and bare rock walls with a thousand-pace drop in this line of work? Why don’t my jobs take me on pleasure cruises with beautiful women and expensive alcohol and chamber music?

I make it out and step gingerly past all the dog excrement. It doesn’t matter if your own body doesn’t have any scent—as mine doesn’t—if you reek of what you stepped in. My master always told me that it’s the little things that’ll get you killed.

He worried about the big things, too. And the medium things. And half the time, a bunch of things I’m pretty sure were imaginary.

The bitter business is hell for paranoia.

I flit from shadow to shadow, getting away from the tunnel entrance. I consider climbing to the roof of a low outbuilding but instead stay on the ground to avoid silhouetting myself, quickly pulling the unstrung bow from my pack. I brace the lower limb of the bow on the ground, set the string in its lower notch, step through, bend the bow, and set the upper string. I check my arrows by feel, then nock a swallowtail broadhead.

The boy’s not a difficult target. He’s twenty paces away, and he’s left off pounding on the door as yelling mercenaries charge toward him with their weapons drawn. His precious ball awkwardly tucked under one elbow, he raises his hands in surrender.

The time is now, before they surround him. The reason I chose a broad-edged swallowtail head on this arrow is because if you shoot someone in the torso, the arrow itself points back toward your location.

My intended shot is more difficult by far. If I clip his scrawny neck with the fat swallowtail head, the arrow will keep flying, disappearing into the darkness. There will be the whisper of an arrow in flight, the alarming spray of arterial blood, and he’ll go down, silenced before he can make my work too difficult, with little hint what direction his death came from.

I told him the price. I gave him the choice. He chose death, not me.

I draw the string to my lips. There’s no wind. Frozen with fear of the approaching mercenaries, the boy’s holding very still. I’ve got this.

I don’t know if you’ve ever shot a recurve bow, but they’re not made to be held fully drawn. Yet I hold.

He’s a child.

A child protecting a monster. An acceptable loss.

I think of Count Drake. I’m recording this for him, narrating everything to the ka’kari. He’d never have asked me to do this job. He’d tell me I’m imperiling my soul. He’d ask if I was certain I’m doing this for justice.

I am.

But how can I look him in the eye and tell him I killed a child?

I can say kids die in wars, that our war’s not really over yet, that it can’t be over until justice is done.

A huge brute of a guard is moving forward. He’ll obscure my shot in about two heartbeats.

One.

I slowly release the tension on the arrow. Lower the bow unshot. Cursing silently, I unstring it, tuck it away.

The door opens, and a man in fine clothes comes out. I lose sight of him as I start moving once more. I hear only snippets of the conversation, questions flying back and forth. I catch glimpses of wild gesticulations as the man in charge interrogates the others.

No, the guards hadn’t seen the agreed-upon alarm, so what’s the problem?

No, they don’t know the kid, but they’re new, they don’t know plenty of people here.

Then, as I come close enough to hear his words clearly, the tenor of the leader’s voice changes. With one hand, he’s got the kid by the front of his tunic; the other hand is holding the ball. “Are you telling me the Night Angel talked to you? And you didn’t give us the signal?!”

The guards exchange glances, some filled with disbelief, others with sudden fear.

As the man drops the kid, I see red sigils on the man’s bare scalp lighting up.

Ah, a red mage. Probably the same one whose work I’d seen above the compound’s walls.

“I didn’t want to lose my ball,” the kid says plaintively.

With a roar, the mage hurls the kid’s ball over the wall and into the slums beyond.

As the ball flies through the weaves above the walls, a deep red light pulses over the whole of the compound. Tendrils of red light burn as if along oil trails to every window and door of the mansion, which then pulse with the same red. The snick of mundane locks slapping shut joins the hum of magics activating, sealing the entire estate.

“My ball!” the kid yells.

Up in the air there’s a blur of blue magics and a meaty crunch. The nearest guards flinch, thinking it’s an attack. Everyone turns to see a bat drop to the ground in several bloody pieces, its predawn hunt cut short.

The red mage snarls at the kid, “You didn’t come over the wall. And you didn’t come through the gate. How’d you get in?”

“I, I—”

“Never mind.” The red mage abruptly turns to search the darkness. “You little fool, you led him right inside. The Night Angel’s already here.”

Pulling her eyes away from the page, Vi slouched in her chair, measuring her breaths so as not to betray the manic smithy in her chest. The handwriting certainly looked like Kylar’s, but having been raised among the Cenarian Sa’kagé, Vi knew a forgery was always possible. She wasn’t an expert. She could be fooled. And the more important the document, the more skeptical you should be.

The Sisters were treating this book as if it were very, very important.

They’d summoned her from her lessons. She’d been expecting that. Her friend Gwaen wished her luck with a tense smile. Vi knew she was going to be punished sooner or later, but the stern, silent Sister hadn’t taken her to stand before some tribunal. Instead, she’d led her to this cozy library with half a dozen scarred black walnut study tables and a few hundred tomes and scrolls, high in the White Seraph. Refusing to answer any of Vi’s questions, she’d seated Viridiana at a table with a single unimpressive codex on it. Common goat leather from the look of it, worn, dyed black. It was blind tooled with a few paltry geometric designs rather than embossed with gold, the edges not gilt or gauffered. And yet it rested here on a platform with gold contact points under a gold-framed glass dome.

Chanting some spell below Vi’s hearing, the Sister had pulled a lever to one side of the dome. Air hissed and a violet pulse shimmered inside it. The Sister carefully lifted off the dome.

“The book stays in this library. So do you. Don’t touch it with magic. All you do is read.” Then the Sister had left.

The book didn’t look worthy of precautions. It looked like a traveling merchant’s account book or diary, sized to fit in a large pocket and plain so as not to tempt thieves. Vi’d opened it with some trepidation, but there had been no explosion of magics.

Nor had there been so much as an inscription to say who it belonged to or what it was. She’d read a few paragraphs before she realized why the handwriting looked familiar. Then she’d become immediately skeptical. A journal? Kylar?

But as she’d read on, her doubts had faded. It was definitely Kylar’s voice through the text. She recognized his way of speaking as clearly as if she were seeing his face. But what was this book? How had the Sisterhood gotten it?

Attempting to mimic the detached interest of her tutors, she looked at one of her least favorite people in the world, the Special Problems and Tactics Team leader Sister Ayayah Meganah. “What is this supposed to be?”

“So you can read it?” the Sister asked, her chin up, her tone suggesting Vi were something repulsive.

“Of course I can!” Vi snapped. “You think I can’t read? You think I’ve been spending all these hours in the library since we got back just to see how long it takes the chairs to flatten my a—my butt?” So much for calm.

She closed her eyes. In her old life, she would have used a lot more profanity and at least a few insults, but Sister Ayayah didn’t seem disposed to praise her.

Dripping condescension like bloodrot venom from her white teeth, her old team leader said, “Not ‘can you read,’ little sister…”

Before she’d come to the Chantry, Viridiana had never appreciated how many ways one could be called ‘little sister.’ Her teachers had explained that the term was intended to be a friendly reminder for full Sisters to be generous with the shortcomings of the less-experienced women training here.

From the sinewy older woman, it had not been anything so kind for a while. Not to Vi. Not since Castle Stormfast, and even less since they’d returned from the debacle on the storm ship. Slowly, as if Vi were stupid, the Sister said, “I asked, ‘Can you read it?’ Watch.”

Sister Ayayah kept her dark hair trimmed close to her skull and wore large hoops in her ears, but she moved with such stately deliberation that her earrings didn’t bob and swing when she moved. She might as well have been an idol of hungry Oyuna carved of ebon wood.

With irritating grace, the Sister glided toward Viridiana’s table, where the solid little tome lay open on a table in the tiny library high in the Chantry.

Vi had wondered why the Sister had stood so far away as Vi had read the first pages. Now she saw why. As the Sister came closer, the words on the page scrambled.

Vi couldn’t even tell if the letters still made actual words. But Sister Ayayah’s tightening lips made her guess they didn’t. “What… what is this?” Vi asked quietly, her rancor forgotten.

“I assume even you aren’t so stupid as to be asking whether it’s a magical book. So I assume, little sister, that you’re asking, ‘What is this magical book I’m reading? Why does it let me read it, but not my betters?’ And, in contradistinction to your first question, that is a very good one indeed.”

Vi snapped her mouth shut. She’d taken greater abuse in her former life, but Sister Ayayah had figured out early that being called stupid cut Vi deeper than other attacks. The Sister delighted to stab at that place, claiming always that it was for Viridiana’s own good, that she was helping Vi build up mental scar tissue on a soft spot.

“This book,” Sister Ayayah said, clipping her words, “is offal. It’s trash. It probably has nothing to do with Kylar at all. He certainly didn’t have the expertise to craft such magic. But now, I am happy to say, this book will wreck your career as it has nearly wrecked mine.”

“What?”

Sister Ayayah went on as if Vi hadn’t spoken. “Because for some reason, despite or because of your gormless lack of sophistication, this book allows you to read it and so far as we can tell no one else. Thus, it falls to me to let you know that the Council for Peace is giving you three days to read it all, finding whatever clues you can, and then to make a report thereon.”

It felt like the bad old days, when the twist who’d been her master would sometimes start a training session by punching Vi in the nose, then attack ferociously, making her defend herself while dazed, her eyes streaming blinding tears and her nose fountaining blood.

“Why is the war council meeting?” Vi managed. “And clues? Clues to what?”

“We need to find—pardon me. You…” Sister Ayayah smiled cruelly, as if in having failed a thankless task, she was now discovering the joys of handing it to someone else. “You need to figure out where Kylar’s body is.”

“From this book? But you said you don’t even know what’s in it, so how do we know that it will—?”

“From the book. Yes. Don’t make me repeat myself. It makes you sound stupider than usual.”

Breathe. Slowly.

Blinking, gaze averted, it took Vi only one breath to master herself.

“But… why? Why do we care? Kylar didn’t exactly make many friends here. There’s no way the Council cares enough to send an expedition back to Alitaera merely to give him a proper burial. Not with how we left things, certainly.”

The Sister’s mouth thinned. “You used to be an assassin. Isn’t it obvious? When one hears that someone as powerful as Kylar Stern is dead, it always pays to see the body yourself.”

“There’s not going to be a body! I already told you. There’s no way he made it to—”

“We have reason to believe he did. At least a short ways.”

“But, but I thought the Seer’s magic had already confirmed he was dead. Is dead.”

With Kylar, there was a yawning gap between those two phrases, but Vi hoped Sister Ayayah had missed it.

Ayayah Meganah suddenly broke eye contact. “Fine. He carried something, allegedly an artifact with potent magics. We have reason to believe he kept it on himself secretly at all times. Did you know about this?”

“No. So you want the artifact. You don’t actually care about his body.”

Vi could see it was true, but Sister Ayayah wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. “But you care, don’t you?” the Sister shot back. “You can tell the others whatever you want, and maybe they’ll believe you. But I saw how you looked at him.”

This time, for Vi to find the flat, expressionless face of Sisterly hatred was no effort at all. “If I find him, will I be allowed to bury him?”

“Oh, little Viridiana. You’ve seen the Sisters arriving from all over the world. A full Convocation has been called to discuss the Alitaeran mess. We’ll vote what to do in three days. As your superior, it will be my strong recommendation that you not be allowed to go on that or any other expedition, not for years. So your job begins and ends with your ass flat in that chair. Given your disastrous performance at the storm ship, if you fail us in this, there will be consequences for your position in this Sisterhood. You have three days, Viridiana,” Sister Ayayah said, smiling unpleasantly. “And today counts as day one.”

I’m clinging to the side of Lord Repha’im’s highest tower under a bank of barred windows, waiting for a guard to move.

I’ve already botched the job. I should’ve abandoned it the instant the words ‘Night Angel’ came out of that kid’s mouth. Definitely as soon as he called me Kylar Stern. There’s no good reason I can’t wait and take up the job in a month, or six months, or two years.

Well, no good reason other than the high king’s decree.

The black ka’kari is covering my skin and blinding any magic-users to my presence. It’s told me I can choose invisibility to mundane sight or invisibility to magical sight, but not both at the same time. Then again, the ka’kari may have lied to make my life harder.

~Me? Lie?~

Given the mages here, I made my choice. So now I’m pressing myself into dark corners, glancing periodically at the guard inside the window and the sky.

The rosy fingers of dawn are scratching the horizon’s back even now.

If I said I was here killing someone for my friend the high king, you’d think you know what I mean. But it’s more complicated than that. Harder. I’m hoping to kill someone without his orders, maybe even against his orders, and yet keep the king my friend.

If I leave only the one monster inside this building dead, Logan might forgive me. If I butcher a dozen men—regardless of how much they deserve it—he’ll be done with me. In fact, he’d probably send his own people to arrest me, and then he’d execute me.

Would he order the execution of his best friend?

Let’s just say I have good reason to believe he would.

I can still abort the job. In some ways, I have all the time in the world.

Terrible people always have lots of enemies, and no one can live on high alert forever. Deaders get impatient. They hole up for a while, but eventually they get bored, decide the danger has passed, and come back out.

That is when my master kills them. It’s the smart approach. It’s what I should do.

But if I can finish this tonight, the high king might still forgive me. If I do it tonight, it’ll still be plausible that I hadn’t heard about his big amnesty. I did outrun the messengers to get here first. But the heralds will be announcing the amnesty first thing in the morning.

But that’s not the real reason I’m here, and we both know it, huh, Count Drake?

Truth is, I can’t let it go. It’s too late to save my foster sisters. But it’s not too late for vengeance.

Justice, I mean.

I rub my eyes with one hand. I haven’t slept well in the months since the last battle at Black Barrow, and not at all in the last day or so. That’s not good. My Talent can’t compensate for slow reflexes and dulled judgment.

Finally, the guard walks away. I look at the bars on the window. The ka’kari can devour small slices of steel to cut through the bars, but it’s full of power already. It would be like trying to fill an oil lamp with a full reservoir. More oil will only splash outside the lamp, which isn’t wise when you’re dealing with fire. In the same way, cutting the bars with the ka’kari now will be like lighting a flare up here in both the magical and the visible spectrums.

I shoot a glance down to the courtyard. A mage, this one helpfully dressed in blue robes, is patrolling there. I can use magic for internal things like strengthening my muscles for a leap without being seen, but anything external I do will be like waving a torch in the darkness. He might not see it if I’m fast enough. If I time it to when he turns away…

No, not worth the risk. Some other pair of eyes might see me.

I pull myself up to peek through the window. The guard is still walking away, heading to the opposite window to join another man there. If the other one turns to greet him while I climb past the window, I’m in it deep.

There are simply too many eyes that might be turned toward me, and too many ways for me to reveal myself through plain bad luck.

Gotta risk it. Here we go.

I feel the tingle of the ka’kari at my fingertips as it soaks up moisture and oils to help my grip. As I said, very helpful when it wants to be.

Decorated corbels support the overhanging flat roof of the tower above me. No magic, plus windows, plus the overhang mean that my best bet is going to be a quick series of dynamic movements. Once more I’m thankful for the years I spent with no Talent. In trying to keep up with my master, I had to learn good climbing technique.

However, I also fell to the ends of lots of ropes in those years—and I never tried anything this stupid. And this time I’ve got no rope to catch me.

I visualize the moves quickly: a quick run up the wall, leap out from the wall with a half-twist, snag the gargoyle below the overhang, spin around it to backflip onto the roof.

No problem, right? I got this.

I am gonna die.

Peeking inside, I see one of the guards hike his thumb toward my window. The other glances over, nods. One of them’s gonna come this way any second.

Now!

I mantle the windowsill with a Talent-assisted heave and run my hands up the bars outside the windows like they’re a ladder. My feet follow, racing up the bars. I twist to face away from the wall and leap up and