Beyond the Shadows - Brent Weeks [183]
“Yes, yes,” Durzo said. “I’ve showed you most of my tricks—”
“Most of them?”
“—and you’ve developed a few of your own. You’re not an apprentice anymore, Kylar—”
“Fine, but I’m hardly—”
“—you are a master. Your tutelage is finished.”
“Don’t cut me loose,” Kylar said. His heart was in his throat.
“I’m cutting you free,” Durzo said.
“But you’re still better than me!”
“And I always will be,” Durzo said. He grinned, and despite himself, Kylar couldn’t help thinking that it was nice to see this once hard and bitter man smile. “In your memories. I’m smart enough to stop fighting you before you start winning. I reached the top of my game, and I had a good run. From here, I’ll only get worse.”
“But you still have so much to teach me.”
“You think this isn’t going to teach you something?”
“What if I fail?” It came out in a whisper.
“What if you do? It won’t change how I feel about you.”
“But I could doom the world! Don’t you care?”
“If I spend my last hours in Gwin’s arms, frankly, not much. Growing old with the woman I love would be my first choice, but dying reconciled with her isn’t a bad second.”
“So I’m alone.”
“I told you that was the cost when you demanded to be my apprentice.”
“I didn’t know I was agreeing to eternity!”
“Cry me a river. You’re pathetic. What’s your plan for getting into the Wood?”
Stung, Kylar shrugged. “The ka’kari.”
“The ka’kari.” Durzo stated the question like Momma K would have. The old man really had spent too long with her.
“It absorbs magic, eludes magic, makes me invisible. I’ll figure something out.” Now he was sounding defensive.
“Whose Wood is this again?” Durzo asked. “Oh yeah, Ezra’s. And who made the ka’kari? Oh, don’t tell me. Ezra.”
“Ezra didn’t make the black.”
“He understood it well enough to make six others. So tell me, fifty years after making six ka’kari he comes here—and at this point he and I aren’t on such good terms—and he makes himself a fortress. You think it never occurred to him that I might try to come in?”
“Uh . . .”
“Kid, you can scare a few Sisters with raw power and bravado, but you’re playing on a different plane here. If you live through Ezra’s defenses—which by the way, you strengthened tenfold by throwing Curoch into the wood—you still have to get around a creature so powerful and so cunning that it may have killed Ezra himself, unless it is Ezra gone utterly mad. Either way, the Hunter isn’t going to be impressed by raw magic. Your newfound confidence is inspiringly suicidal.”
Kylar was silent. Then he said, “I won’t be stopped.”
“Shut up, she comes.”
Kylar rolled the ka’kari into the center of the fire. The flames collapsed into the ball, dying instantly, plunging the clearing into darkness. Kylar jumped left and Durzo rolled right even as purple magic blazed through the clearing in jagged hands. Kylar extended a hand and the ka’kari leapt into it, flooding him with the energy it had absorbed from the fire.
He leapt from tree to tree, sinking black claws into the sides of each, and saw a maja flailing about herself, suddenly blind. Fires flared around her. She flipped them back and forth wildly like great scythes in her fear. The magic slapped against the trees, singeing bark, sending up gouts of steam, but the recent rains and snows prevented any fires from bursting forth. Durzo, on the ground, was beneath the swipes, and Kylar was above them.
In moments, the maja had exhausted her Talent and with no sunlight and no fire to draw from, her magic guttered out.
In the sudden darkness, both men moved. Kylar was on her almost before she could scream. He flew straight over her head, grabbed fistfuls of cloak and robe as he passed, and used her body weight like a beam to flip himself over and stop, which transferred his momentum to her. She flew backward half a dozen paces and crashed into a tree trunk, the breath whooshing from her lungs. Kylar landed on one knee on the forest floor and stood, blue flame trickling over his features.
By the time she’d taken two breaths, something was rising from deep beneath her