Kylar shook his head. He wasn’t even planning to stay here more than a few minutes, but Durzo’s habit of checking traps and examining every corner for threats had sunk deep.

And where was Durzo? What had he been doing? Had he simply moved on to another life? Was it so easy for him to leave everything behind? The idea soured Kylar’s mood. Durzo was the central figure in Kylar’s life, and he’d abandoned him. Durzo had given him the ka’kari, a treasure of untold worth, but he hadn’t given Kylar his trust—or his time.

A dusty glass case sat next to the dusty desk. Kylar opened the case. Inside, labeled in Durzo’s neat hand, were dozens of jars of herbs, potions, elixirs, and tinctures. Durzo had told Kylar that some wetboys mislabeled their herbs deliberately, so as to confuse or kill anyone who stole from them. Durzo said anyone who had the resources and guts to steal from him could identify an herb or hire someone to do it for him. Kylar suspected the real reason was that Durzo couldn’t bear to mislabel anything.

That he wouldn’t mislabel his supplies, however, didn’t mean that Durzo did label all of them. Durzo believed that safe houses had a one-in-four chance of being discovered in any given year, so he spread the most valuable items of his collection out among them to minimize losses. Managing such an inventory was probably half the reason Kylar’s master had been so paranoid. For in this now-worthless safe house, in an unmarked vial smaller than Kylar’s thumb, was a substance that looked like liquid gold. It had cost Durzo half a year and as much as a manse on Sidlin Way. Its proper name was philodunamos. Durzo called it bottled fire.

Whereas almost every other tool of the trade was mundane, if rarely known, bottled fire was magic. The only people who could make it were the Harani aborigines, whose magic was tied to emotion and song. After being driven from their lowland homes two centuries ago, they hadn’t had access to the materials they needed to make philodunamos. How Durzo had known what those were, how he had gathered them, and how he had coached a Harani mage into making such a lethal substance, Kylar had no idea.

Sitting at the desk, Kylar rooted around until he found the gold-plated tweezers, a wad of cotton, and a candle. Then he couldn’t find a tinderbox. Since he could see in the dark, he never carried one anymore. Without a tinder-box, he couldn’t light the candle, without the candle, he couldn’t clean the tweezers, without clean tweezers, he couldn’t pull off a wisp of cotton to dip into the bottled fire, without the cotton, he couldn’t test an appropriately tiny measure of the bottled fire. He swore under his breath.