Finally, he slept. When he woke, he felt better than he had any right to. He washed himself and felt refreshed. As he scraped off his stubble, he caught himself grinning in one of the shards of the mirror. Blint didn’t mean to kill me at all, but he couldn’t resist putting a dart in me just to show that he could. The old bastard. Kylar laughed. The really old bastard.

It was gallows humor, but he needed whatever he could find.

He got dressed and armed, thinking mournfully of the gear he’d lost last night. Daggers, poisons, grappling hooks, throwing knives, tanto, poisoner’s knife—he’d lost all of his favorites except for Retribution. Mourning my gear, but not Logan or Durzo or Elene. It was so ridiculous that Kylar laughed again.

He was, he decided, a little off. Maybe it was natural. He’d never lost anyone he really cared about before. Now he’d lost three in one night.

The streets were crowded in the late afternoon when Kylar finally emerged from his safe house. Rumors were flying about what had happened at the castle in the night. An army had appeared from thin air. An army had boiled up out of the Vos Island Crack. An army of mages from the south had come. No, they were wytches from the north. Highlanders had killed everyone in the castle. Khalidor was going to raze the entire city.

Few of the rumormongers seemed worried. Kylar saw a few people with their belongings loaded onto carts or wagons and heading out of the city, but there weren’t many. No one else seemed to believe that anything bad could happen to them.

Momma K’s hideout was still being guarded by the sinewy Cewan pretending to fix the fence. Kylar didn’t bother becoming invisible. He approached the man unhurriedly, leaned over to ask directions and put a hand on the man’s concealed short sword. The man tried to draw too late and found the sword locked in Kylar’s grip. Kylar broke the man’s sternum with an open-handed strike, leaving him gasping, his mouth working like a fish’s.

Kylar took the keys from the man’s belt and opened the door. He locked it after himself and embraced the shadows.

Invisible, he found Momma K in the study looking over reports from her brothels. He read them silently over her shoulder. She was trying to piece together what had happened at the castle.

The needle sank into the sagging flesh at the back of her arm. She cried out and clawed at it. She pulled the needle out then turned her chair slowly, looking ancient.

“Hello, Kylar,” she said. “I expected you yesterday.”

He appeared in the other chair, a lounging young Death. “How’d you know it was me?”

“Durzo would have used a poison that would leave me in agony.”