Beyond the Shadows - Brent Weeks [49]
It would probably only be minutes before they panicked, and then it was only a matter of how many people would be slaughtered before Luc Graesin called off the attack and tried to shut the gates before the sa’ceurai got into the city.
Kylar dropped into the great yard and stole a leather gambeson from a pile, along with trousers and a tunic. A minute later, he stepped out from behind a smithy as a boy hurried past pushing a cart filled with cheap swords and pole arms.
“So the Rabbits get to lead the attack? Hit ’em at dawn?” Kylar said, waving at the battle flags. “How’d that happen?”
The kid lit up. “We volunteered.”
“I know a man who volunteered to snort guri pepper sauce. It didn’t make it a good idea.”
“What are you saying?” the kid asked, offended.
“Why’s the queen letting them go first?”
“It’s not the queen. It’s her brother Luc. He’s Lord General now.”
“And?”
The kid scowled. “He said the uh, the casualties would be highest among the first ones out. You know, till we took out their archers. The Rabbits ain’t scared of nothing.”
So the new Lord General manages to cull his bravest citizens and ensure a crushing defeat, all at once. Brilliant.
“You mind? I got work to do,” the kid said.
Kylar stole a horse. He didn’t have the time to walk to the castle. As he mounted, a groom came toward him. “Hey, who are you? That horse belongs to—”
Kylar brought the mask of judgment to his face in a rush and whipped his head toward the man, snarling, blue flame leaping up in his eyes and mouth.
The groom leapt backward and tripped into a horse trough with a yell.
Kylar rode as fast as he could. He left the horse and the stolen clothes before he got to East Kingsbridge and went invisible. He ran the rest of the way, leaving guards with their heads swiveling, trying to find where the patter of running feet had come from. Rather than run through the twisting, illogical halls of the castle, he climbed the wall. In minutes, he dropped onto the queen’s balcony, which was still missing part of the railing where Kylar had freed Mags Drake’s corpse. He looked inside.
The queen wasn’t alone.
22
Before I sent you after Sister Jessie, you said you’d been studying something for two years,” Istariel Wyant, the Speaker of the Chantry, said. They were sitting in her office, high in the Seraph, sharing ootai and strategy. “What was it?”
“The ka’karifer,” Ariel said.
“The what? My Hyrillic isn’t what it used to be.”
A doubtful look crossed Ariel’s face. “Your Hyrillic was never what it used to be. If I recall correctly, your marks in all your language classes—”
“The question, Ariel,” Istariel snapped, with more vigor than she intended. Only perhaps a dozen Sisters in the Chantry would recall how poorly she had performed in a few of her classes, and none of them would dare correct the Speaker. None except Ariel, who was not correcting her because she thought being Istariel’s sister gave her license: Ariel would correct anyone.
“The bearers of the stones of stones,” Ariel said. “Colloquially that would have meant stones of greatest power. The original bearers were Jorsin’s Champions of Light: Trace Arvagulania—fascinating, I think you would have liked her. She was one of the foremost minds of the age in an age famous for great minds. Probably not matched even to the present day, though I know Rosserti argues that Milovian Period is as important, I personally find his contentions regarding the Alitaeran succession