"A rare thing," Vane said again, quieter, almost to himself.
Nathan stayed by the wall. "You said introductions. So introduce yourself. Who are you, and why did you help us?"
Vane crossed to one of the long tables and set his gloves down on it, taking his time.
"You can call me Vane. As for why." He glanced back. "I’ve been looking for you for days. Ever since I walked into a certain storeroom off the low district and found two dead slavers on the floor. Perrin and Hask. I believe you knew them."
The room went very still.
"One with his throat cut," Vane continued, conversational, as if discussing the weather. "The other reduced to an empty husk. No blood in him. No life in him. Every drop of what he was, drawn out through the flesh and gone." He tapped the table once. "I’ve practiced dark arts for thirty years, boy. I have never seen a body emptied like that. But I knew what it meant the moment I touched it."
Nathan’s blood turned cold.
’He knows. He was there. He saw what I did.’
His hand found his dagger under the cloak. He stepped back, one slow step, then another, and pushed Kira behind him with his free arm, keeping his body between her and the mage. His eyes went to the door they’d come through, then to the shadows along the walls where anything could be waiting, then back to Vane.
’The buyer. He was their buyer. He came for the parts and found them dead, and now he’s found me. He led us underground. Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody would ever know—’
"Stop," Vane said.
He let out a long sigh, dragged a chair from the table, and sat down in it. He spread both empty hands.
"If I wanted you dead, I have had a hundred better chances than this one, and I would not have wasted my strength saving you from the watch first. Think, boy. I am sitting in a chair. Sit down or stand there sweating, but stop reaching for that knife. It offends us both."
Nathan didn’t sit. But he stopped retreating.
"You bought from them," he said. "Perrin and Hask. You were the buyer they were waiting for."
"I bought materials from many ugly men. It is the nature of my work that ugly men are the suppliers." Vane said it without shame. "But I did not come looking for you to avenge them, if that’s your worry. They were tools, and someone broke them. What I came for is you. Because you and I, boy, are the same."
"We’re nothing alike."
"No?" Vane leaned back. "Then let me tell you a story, and you tell me at the end if it sounds familiar."
He was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again, the polish had gone out of his voice.
"Forty years ago I stood in a temple at my own awakening ceremony, a merchant’s third son, expecting nothing. And a god looked at me. The God of Darkness. The light over the altar went black, the whole hall saw it, and the system gave me the Dark Mage class." His mouth twisted. "A forbidden class. A cursed one, they said. The priests went white. My own father stepped away from me.
"The king heard of it before nightfall. And do you know what the crown does with a boy who awakens a class it fears?"
Nathan said nothing. His throat had gone tight.
"It sent men to execute me. That same week. No trial, no charge, no reason given to anyone. Soldiers in my father’s house in the dark." Vane’s grey eyes were flat. "I escaped. Barely, and not cleanly, and I’ve never once told anyone what it cost. And when the crown realized I’d slipped them, they didn’t admit a boy had outrun the king’s justice. They invented a crime. They announced that I had stolen a divine item from the royal vault, and they put a bounty on my head that stands to this day. Forty years a fugitive in my own land, for the crime of being marked by the wrong god."
Silence sat in the underground room.
Nathan stared at him.
Every word of it landed somewhere that was already bruised. A god no one wanted. A king who sent killers instead of questions. A lie, spread through the streets, dressed as an official story, to bury the truth of what the crown had done. Vane had been made a thief. Nathan had been made his own mother’s murderer.
’He’s me,’ Nathan thought, and hated how easily the thought came. ’Forty years ahead of me, but he’s me.’
His grip on the dagger loosened. Behind him, he felt Kira’s hands ease off his arm.
"They told everyone I killed my mother," Nathan said. He hadn’t planned to say it. It came out anyway, flat and quiet. "The assassins did it. On the king’s order. And the Royal Guards walked through my district and told my neighbors I did it."
Vane nodded slowly, without surprise, without pity either, which somehow made it bearable.
"Yes," he said. "That is what they do. The crown never kills a man once. It kills him, and then it kills his name." He studied Nathan for a moment. "What class?"
Nathan hesitated. Then, because the man had put his own truth on the table first:
"Death Knight."
Something moved in Vane’s face. Not fear. Recognition, and under the recognition, a kind of awe he didn’t try to hide.
"Death," he said softly. "Darkness and Death. Brother aspects. No wonder your work called to me from across a district. Your power and mine are cut from the same night, boy. Two forbidden classes, from two gods this kingdom has spent two hundred years pretending don’t exist." He shook his head slowly. "The same story, forty years apart. Even down to the lie."
He rose from the chair.
"Which brings me to the reason I spent days hunting you, and half my strength pulling you out of that yard." He crossed to a shelf, ran one finger along the spines of the old books there, and turned back with his flat grey eyes fixed on Nathan.
"Tell me, boy. Do you actually know why the king wants you dead? Not the story. Not the lie they fed your district. The real reason."
Nathan went still.
He’d asked himself that question a hundred times. In the forest, in the tree, over his mother’s grave. Why. Why would a king fear a cursed class that was supposed to kill anyone who used it? Why send assassins the same day? He’d never found an answer that fit.
"I’m sure you have no idea," Vane said. "Allow me to explain."