Water swelled as if an immense arrow were passing just under the surface of the sea—and then stopped as it reached the second Cenarian warship. The men on its deck, fifty paces away, were shouting, shooting arrows into the water, brandishing swords, the captain trying to turn the ship.
For five seconds nothing happened, then two gray massive somethings slapped against the Cenarian ship’s deck. They were too big for Kaldrosa to even guess what they could be for a moment—each one covered nearly a quarter of the ship’s hull. Then the ship bounced ten paces out of the sea, straight up, and Kaldrosa saw that they were fingers of a massive gray hand. Then the hand went down and the entire ship disappeared under the waves, bursting apart as the water closed over it, throwing splinters in a wave.
Then the black shape was moving again. It was too big to be real. And this time, the men on the last Cenarian ship were screaming. Kaldrosa heard orders being shouted, but there was too much chaos. The ship drifted, even though it had closed the distance with her sea cow while the other ships had been being destroyed, and was now almost touching it.
The sea swelled again, but this time there was no pause. The leviathan swam beneath the Cenarian ship at incredible speed, rising high enough in the water that spines from its back rose thirty feet in the air.
The spines cut the ship in half and two flicks of a gray tail smashed each half into the ocean. The Khalidoran soldiers who’d crowded the deck—Kaldrosa hadn’t even noticed them emerging—cheered.
She was about to begin ordering them back to their places when the cheering suddenly stopped. The soldiers were pointing. She followed their gaze and saw that swell rising again, this time pointed straight for them. The wytches were sweating freely, open panic on their faces.
“No!” a young wytch shouted. “That won’t work. Like this.”
Something rippled out from the wytches toward the leviathan. It met the oncoming beast, and nothing happened. The soldiers cried out in horror.
Then the huge shape turned and went out to sea.
The soldiers cheered and the wytches collapsed on the deck. But something wasn’t finished. Kaldrosa saw that immediately. Even as she ordered the oars pulled and the sails raised once more, she kept an eye on the wytches.
The leader was speaking to the young man who—if Kaldrosa guessed correctly—had taken control and saved all of their lives. The young man shook his head, staring at the deck.
“Obedience unto death,” she heard him say.
The leader spoke again, too low for Kaldrosa to make out, and the other eleven wytches gathered around the two men. They laid their hands on the young man who’d saved them all, and Kaldrosa saw his tattoos rise from below his skin. They swelled and swelled until his arms were black, and then they burst—not outward, away from the wytch’s body, but in, as if they were veins that had been overfilled and now leaked through the rest of his body. The ruptured tattoos bled beneath the young man’s skin and he collapsed to the deck, twitching violently. In moments, his entire body was black. He thrashed and choked, and in moments he was dead.
Everyone else on the ship was studiously ignoring the wytches. Kaldrosa found herself the only one watching the exchange. The leader of the wytches said a word, and the other wytches tossed the corpse overboard. Then he turned and watched her with too-blue eyes.
Never again, Kaldrosa swore to herself. Never again.
“Do you know the secret of effective blackmail, Durzo?” Roth asked. He was seated at a fine oak table incongruously placed in a typical Warrens hovel. Durzo stood before him like a chastened courtier standing before the king. Roth’s chair was even raised. The presumption.
“Yes,” Durzo said. He wasn’t in any mood for games.
“Refresh me,” Roth said, looking up from the reports he’d been reading. He was not amused.
Durzo cursed himself and cursed fate. He’d done everything to avert this, paid every price of misery, and yet it had come. “Use your hold to get a better hold.”
“You’ve made that difficult for me, Durzo. You’ve convinced everyone that you don’t give a damn about anything.”
“Thank you.” Durzo didn’t smile. It wasn’t in him to play the abased servant.
“The problem is, I’m more clever than you are.”
“Cleverer.”
Roth’s close-set eyes narrowed at Blint’s blithe monotone. Roth was a lean young man with an angular face obscured by an oiled black goatee and long hair. He disliked making words for their own sake. He disliked people. He stuck out an open hand. Waited.
Durzo tossed him the bit of pretty silver glass.
Roth looked at it briefly and threw it back, unamused. “Don’t toy with me, assassin. I know there was a real one there. We have two spies who saw someone bond it.”
“Then they should have told you someone got there first.”
“Really.”
Roth was mimicking Momma K’s tendency to state questions. He probably thought it made him seem authoritative. Roth was out of his league if he thought mimicking Momma K would be enough to hold power. Part of Durzo wanted to tell Roth that Momma K was the Shinga. Roth obviously didn’t know, and Momma K had betrayed Durzo, but Durzo had no taste for using rats to do a man’s work. If he killed Gwinvere, he’d do it with his own hands. If? I’m going soft. When. She betrayed me. She must die.
“Really,” Durzo answered, with no intonation.
“Then I think it’s time for you to meet another of my cards.” There was no signal that Durzo could see, but an old man stepped into the hovel instantly. The creature was short and bent still further by more years than a mortal frame should endure. He had piercing blue eyes and a fringe of silver hair combed over a bald dome of head.
The man gave a toothless grin. “I am Vürdmeister Neph Dada, counselor and seer to His Majesty.”
Not just any wytch. A Vürdmeister. Durzo Blint felt old. “How exalted. I thought you called your dog kings His Holiness,” Durzo said.
“His Majesty,” Neph Dada said, “Roth Ursuul, ninth aetheling of the Godking.” He bowed to Roth.
By the Night Angels. He wasn’t kidding.
Neph Dada grabbed Durzo’s chin with a frail hand and pulled it down toward himself until Durzo looked into his eyes. “He knows who took the Globe of Edges,” Neph said.
There was no denying it. Not with a Vürdmeister here. Vürdmeisters were supposed to be able to read minds. It wasn’t true, but it was close enough. Most of them couldn’t do it, Durzo knew. Even those who could didn’t actually read minds. The way Durzo had heard it explained, longer ago than he liked to remember, was that they could see hints of images that their subject had seen. The best Vürdmeisters could intuit a lot of truth from a few images, though. It was almost the same thing at this point. How can I take advantage of the differences between what I’ve seen and what I know?
“It was my apprentice,” Durzo said.
Roth Ursuul—by the Night Angels, Ursuul?—raised an eyebrow.
“He doesn’t know what it is,” Durzo said. “I don’t know who sent him. He never does jobs without telling me.”
“Perhaps you should not be so sure of this?” Neph said.
“I’ll get the ka’kari for you. I just need some time.”
“Ka’kari?” Roth asked.
Roth had never used the word. It was a stupid mistake. Totally uncharacteristic. Durzo was falling apart.
“The Globe of Edges,” Durzo said.
“I’ve given you a chance to be honest with me, Durzo. So what I’m going to do is your own fault.” Roth motioned to one of the guards at the entrance to the hovel. “The girl.”
Several moments later, a little girl was carried in. She was drugged, whether chemically or magically, and the guard had some trouble carrying her limp body. She was maybe eleven years old, skinny and dirty, but not the skinny and dirty of a street rat—healthy skinny, healthy dirty. Her black hair was long and curly, and her face had the same angelic-demonic cast that her mother’s had had. She would be even prettier than Vonda, some day. She took her height from Durzo, but thank the gods, everything else from her mother. Uly was a damn fine-looking kid. It was the first time Durzo had seen his daughter.