At the same time, despair rose in her. They cut the ferali a hundred times. Two hundred. They attacked its eyes, its mouth. They cut off parts of its body. It bled, and its total mass decreased by a few pounds, but that was all. They cut it and it healed. But they could never make a mistake. Once that skin touched theirs, they would die.

~I also cut.~

Kylar alighted on the side of a pillar and stopped. Runes were glowing in ka’kari black edged in blue along his arm. He stared at them. “You what?” he asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” Vi said. Her eyes were on an enormous spider chittering on the floor in front of her.

“Stupid! How slow am I?” Kylar said, dropping to the floor.

~Is that a rhetorical question?~

The ka’kari poured a dark liquid from his hand onto his sword. But then the liquid solidified as a thin sword. Kylar cut left and right and spider legs went flying. It wasn’t like hacking through bone, he was shearing them off like butter.

He dodged back, and the spider gathered its legs to itself, but this time, the stumps kept bleeding. They smoked and wouldn’t allow new limbs to be grown there. It morphed back into the man with swords for arms, but now the wounds were on the man’s chest, still flowing with blood and smoking. It roared and attacked Kylar.

Kylar slashed left and right and the sword-arms tumbled across the floor. He rammed the ka’kari into the ferali’s chest. With a sharp motion, he pulled it down to the creature’s groin. Smoke billowed, blood gushed. Kylar yanked the sword up, making another huge cut.

He saw it too late. The ferali’s skin drew back from the sword, like a pond might crater when a stone falls into it, only to burst upward. The skin rushed up the sword all at once.

It engulfed Kylar’s hand.

He threw himself back, but the ferali, limp now, fell forward with him, attached to his hand. Kylar jerked the sword back and forth and smoke gushed from the ferali as he gutted it, but it didn’t lose its grip.

Kylar reached for a dagger, but he’d used them all in the battle. “Vi,” he shouted. “Cut it off!”

She hesitated.

“Cut off my hand!”

She couldn’t do it.

The skin twitched again and it rushed up his forearm.

Kylar screamed and twisted. A blade of ka’kari formed along the ridge of his left hand and he cut off his right arm. Released from the pull of the dying ferali, he collapsed backward.

He held the gushing stump in his left hand. A moment later, black metal shimmered in every exposed vein and the bleeding stopped. A black cap sheathed his stump. Kylar looked at Vi dumbly.

Ten feet away, the ferali’s corpse was oozing. It began to break apart, weaves of magic unraveling. The mouthy skin rippled and evaporated and then all that was left was stinking ropes of meat and sinew and bone.

“That,” the Godking’s voice said, “was impressive, Kylar. You showed me some things that I wasn’t aware the ka’kari could do. Most instructive. And Vi, you’ll serve admirably, and not just in my bed.”

Something in Vi snapped. In the last two days, she’d changed everything. A new Vi was fighting to be born—and the Godking was here, saying nothing had changed. The new Vi would be a stillbirth. She’d go back to being a whore. She’d go back to being the same cold, hard bitch.

She’d thought that life was the only one open to her, so she’d borne the unbearable. But having seen a way to be a woman she didn’t hate, she couldn’t go back.

“Get it through your fat head, Gare,” she said, even as she felt magical bonds wrapping around her limbs and Kylar’s again. “I won’t serve you.”

Garoth smiled godly benevolence. “The feisty ones always make me hard.”

“Kylar,” Vi said. “Snap out of it. You gotta help me kill this fucking twist.”

The Godking laughed. “Compulsion doesn’t hold on everyone, Vi. The Niles’ magic would have freed most people. About nineteen years ago, there was some Ceuran slut that I seduced during a diplomatic trip. I sent men to collect her when I found out she was pregnant, but she ran away before they got there. When I found out she bore a girl, I dismissed the matter. I usually have my daughters drowned—it’s good practice for my boys, it makes them tough—but it wasn’t worth the effort. Compulsion, Vi, only works on family, and sometimes not on boys. You—”

“You’re not my father,” Vi said. “You’re just a sick fuck who’s about to die. Kylar!”

“Now Vi, let’s not get all teary-eyed,” Garoth Ursuul said. “You’re nothing to me but five minutes of pleasure and a spoonful of seed. Well, that’s not true. You see, Vi, you’re a wetboy I can trust. You will never disobey me, never betray me.”

Vi was gripped by terror tighter than the magic that bound her limbs. Possibilities were dying on every side.

Kylar stirred. His eyes came back into focus. He wiggled his eyebrows at her, trying to be charming. The outrageous cuteness of it cracked her paralysis. His pale blue eyes said, You with me?

Hers answered him with a fierce, desperate joy that needed no translation.

Under his breath, Kylar said, “You take his attention, I’ll take his life.” He smiled and the rest of Vi’s fear blew away. It was a real smile, with no desperation. There was no doubt in Kylar’s eyes. Any additional obstacle—whether magical bonds or the loss of an arm—would only sweeten his victory. Killing the Godking was Kylar’s destiny.

“You leave me no choice,” Garoth Ursuul said. He pursed his lips. “Daughter, kill Kylar.”

The ka’kari opened and devoured the bonds holding Vi and Kylar. Vi was moving, beginning a flashy, eye- grabbing stunt.

Then …everything stopped.

There was a gap of volition. In her mind’s eye, Vi was leaping through the air, flying toward the Godking, her blade descending, his face twisting into a rictus of fear as he saw that his shields were gone, as he realized she’d defeated his compulsion—

But that was only her imagination.

A shock of impact ran up Vi’s arm. Her wrist flexed as if to complete a horizontal slash through a heart, but she saw nothing, knew nothing except that there was a blank.

The gap cleared, and Vi was aware once more. Her fingers were uncurling from the familiar grip of her favorite knife. Kylar—so slowly, so painfully slowly—was falling. He drifted toward the floor, his head arcing back in a slow whiplash from having her knife rammed into his back, his dark hair rippling from the shock. It wasn’t until he hit the floor that Vi realized that Kylar was dead. She had killed him.

“That, my dear daughter,” Garoth Ursuul said, “is compulsion.”

69

Kylar pushed through the fog in a rush. In a moment that seemed out of joint, as if time didn’t work the same way here, he was back in the indistinct room, once again facing the lupine, gray-haired man with his hair pure white on one temple.

“Two days isn’t going to cut it,” Kylar said. “I need to go back now.”

“Impertinence last time, demands this time,” the man said.

The man cocked his head, as if listening, and Kylar was again aware of the others. They were invisible when Kylar looked directly at them, but definitely there. Could he see them a little better this time? “Yes, yes,” the Wolf said to a voice Kylar couldn’t hear.

“Who are they?” Kylar asked.

“Immortality is lonely, Kylar. Madness need not be.”

“Madness?”

“Say hello to the grand company of my imagination, gleaned from those profound souls I have known over the years. Not ghosts, just facsimiles, I’m afraid.” The lupine man nodded his head again toward one of them and chuckled.

“If they’re not real, why are you talking to them and not to me?” Kylar asked. He was still angry and this time, he wasn’t going to take the man’s chiding or his mysteries. “I need your help. Now.”