Perfect Shadow_ A Night Angel Novella - Brent Weeks [9]
He could muffle his steps, too.
They trained with every weapon imaginable. Ben was fast, and Gaelan was a fast learner. Ben was obviously impressed with the warrior, though Gaelan tried to hide some of his more impressive skills. Ben also mentioned other wetboy skills that he himself didn’t practice and gave Gaelan an enormous tome of poisons: “My master had, uh, an accident before he could teach me most of this, and I’m a bad reader.”
“That’s awfully generous.”
“Don’t worry. I’m charging Gwinvere for it.”
Ah. Ben couldn’t read the coded notations, so the book was worthless to him, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you could fence. Who’d buy it? If someone did, they might be your enemy. Far better to charge a friend full price and make it their problem. Clever.
Ben wasn’t much help with disguises, though, saying with his scars he wasn’t going to pass as anything other than himself.
He watched Gaelan shoot the bow, nailing a bull’s-eye ten times in a row from a hundred paces—Gaelan was justly famous for his archery—and said, “Looks like we won’t need to cover that.”
Gaelan couldn’t master the art of throwing his voice, though. Ben could mimic voices perfectly, as well—something Gaelan was certain was akin to the more massive sorts of body magic he himself did.
Teaching Ben a few of his own tricks would have been only fair, but much as Gaelan liked Ben, the man was a stone killer. Gaelan wasn’t going to teach a wetboy those abilities.
One day, two weeks in, they were fighting sickle against chain spear. They’d been working for ten hours, sweating copiously from the fire they kept going in the room to refill their Talents. Ben threw off his tunic and Gaelan saw the rest of the man’s scars for the first time.
The Friaki were much more likely to scar with keloids than people of other nations: their bodies pushing scars outward, giving them a raised appearance. Ben Wrable was covered with self-inflicted keloid scars from his neck to his fingertips.
“I was a gorathi’s son. A prince, if you will. I was kidnapped as a young boy from my clan. A great insult to my father. In Friaku, a son is his father’s strength. I was brought here and sold into the Death Games, where I excelled. When I won my freedom, I went back to Friaku, but my clan had been massacred long ago. No one knew their names. For all I know, the slave traders lied, and I’m just a peasant’s son. I’ll never know.”
The Friaki had a taboo against speaking about the dead. Ben might have spoken to his own uncle, and if he hadn’t approached the subject just the right way, the man would have denied knowing anything. Not having been raised there, Ben wouldn’t have known.
“What’s that one for?” Gaelan asked. Most of the scars appeared to be gibberish. Designs interspersed with guesses at Friaki script. In the center of his chest, though, he had cut a large circle, split halfway by a single line, straight down his sternum. That scar had been cut and recut many times.
“I had a pendant, made of two iron horseshoe nails. It was taken from me when I came to train for the Death Games. I cut it into myself so I’d never forget. No one I spoke to in Friaku had seen it before. Have you?”
“No,” Gaelan lied. Ben Wrable was a man cut off from a home he would never know. A man who’d been destroyed while still a child. A man trying to hold on to one small thing, driven near madness trying to hold on to his Friaki identity, because he sure as hell didn’t belong anywhere else.
Besides, referents change, especially the referents of universal symbols like lines and circles. And it had been a long time since Gaelan had lived in Friaku.
But the truth was Gaelan just didn’t have the heart to tell Ben what it really meant.
* * *