Perfect Shadow: A Night Angel Novella

“You pass. Second test!” Ben crossed his arms over his chest and stepped off the peaked roof he was standing on.
    Gaelan leapt across the gap to the roof and ran to the spot where the wetboy had disappeared. There was nothing there. Wind. Misting rain. He searched the darkness, muscles tensed. But even his preternatural sight didn’t help.
    “Here,” a voice whispered.
    Gaelan whipped around, daggers coming out, dropping low. There was nothing where the voice had come from.
    Something slammed into the back of his knee and swept him off his feet. He fell, tumbling down the steep roof. The daggers went flying as his fingertips fought for purchase on the slate tiles.
    He fell off the roof. He swung his hands, expecting a gutter – some kind of edge.
    Nothing. There were only a few decorative dog gargoyles. He reached. Missed.
    Phantom hands made of pure magic whipped out beyond his own fingers and snagged the gargoyle. He pulled so hard he ripped it right off – and threw himself back up and onto the roof.
    He landed in a fighting stance, a Plangan style, almost ludicrously low, but helpful with the steep pitch of the roof here in case he had to use his hands.
    But Ben Wrable was standing, arms folded, chuckling.
    “Looks like you don’t know everything yet, sword swinger.”
    “You can throw your voice,” Gaelan said.
    Ben smiled.
    “You won’t catch me like that again,” Gaelan vowed.
    Ben walked over to the edge, looked down at where the dog gargoyle lay shattered far below. A crowd had gathered, alarmed, looking up. “Enough entertainment for the locals.”

    * * *
    “Where’d you pick up this style?” Gaelan asked as they sparred the next night. Ben Wrable’s style with the staff reminded him of Peerson Jules, one of the last non-crazy Lae’knaught underlords. That had been two hundred years ago.
    “Made it up,” Ben said. “My own master only did bladed weapons.” He grabbed a pair of sais off the wall and slowly faded from sight. Embracing the shadows, he called it. In bright light, it reduced him to a man-size smudge of inky blackness – nothing close to invisibility, nothing close to what Gaelan could do with the aid of his ka’kari – but on a dark night it was pretty damn good.
    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