beyond the shadows by brent weeks

Author:brent weeks
Language: eng
Format: epub

53

Kylar sat in the darkness and stench of his cell deep into the night.

He threw the ka’kari into the corner of the room. It bounced eerily noiselessly. He extended a hand and willed it back. It flew through the air as if on invisible strings and slapped into his palm. He threw it again and this time willed it to mold itself into a spike. He sucked it back through the air and when it hit his palm it squished and went back into his body.

He could escape. After he died this time, everything would be different.

He heard the sound of someone speaking in a distant hallway. A door opened, and soon Kylar heard the sound of a big man’s footsteps. The face that eventually appeared, however, wasn’t the one he expected.

“Lantano Garuwashi,” Kylar said, standing and bowing.

“Night Angel.” Garuwashi bowed equally low. “May I come in?”

Kylar smirked at how the man was treating this like a social visit. “Please.”

Garuwashi unlocked the door and came in.

“How’d you get here?” Kylar asked.

“I asked permission.”

“Ah.”

“You rob me, Night Angel.”

“How so?” Kylar asked.

“Our duel. It was to have been the height of our glory. A duel for the ages.”

Kylar didn’t know why, but that Lantano Garuwashi was peeved not to get to fight him five years hence somehow warmed Kylar. Perhaps it was the only way Garuwashi had to say that he would have liked to be Kylar’s friend. “The Night Angels keep their word,” Kylar said. “A Night Angel will be there, I promise.”

“He will be your equal?”

“He may even be yours,” Kylar said, grinning.

Garuwashi cracked a smile. He sat on the stone shelf opposite Kylar and folded his legs beneath himself. Kylar sat similarly on his bunk. “I don’t understand Cenarian honor,” Lantano Garuwashi said. “King Gyre will rule whether you do this or not. Why will you die for a people unworthy of you?”

“I don’t know. I only know it felt like the right thing to do.”

“Do you have a lover? Does she approve of this?”

Kylar hadn’t even thought of it. The look on his face must have betrayed him, because Garuwashi shook his head, chuckling.

“You tell me, Night Angel, would you give her life to accomplish this?”

Kylar was as shocked that Lantano Garuwashi was asking the question as he was by the question itself. “I wouldn’t ask anyone to die for my ideals.”

“Yet you ask Logan to kill for them.”

Kylar had no answer.

“Since you’ve never sent men to their deaths, let me make the question easier. Would your lover give her life to change this land?”

“Yes, gladly.”

“Then perhaps she will forgive you one day.”

Well, I plan to come back to life before she finds out. Instead, Kylar said, “I wouldn’t have expected a sa’ceurai to care what a woman thinks.”

Garuwashi burst into laughter. “No sa’ceurai wishes to marry a shadow. A woman should be as fiery as her hair. Ceuran women whisper on the streets and shout in the home. Young sa’ceurai think that means only in the bedroom.” Garuwashi grinned.

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