Night Angel

There are killers, and then there are wetboys — and the difference is that a wetboy never misses, because the magic in his blood will not let him. In the reeking Warrens of Cenaria, a guild rat called Azoth trades everything he has for a way out: apprenticeship to Durzo Blint, the deadliest man in the city. What he becomes is Kylar Stern, and what he inherits is a world where deniable murder is a trade, kings are bought, and one black artifact can make its bearer the Night Angel — undying, and never allowed to rest. This is Midcyru, the grim, knife-edged setting of Brent Weeks's fantasy. The core is the Night Angel Trilogy — The Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge, and Beyond the Shadows — with the novella Perfect Shadow filling in Durzo's long history, and a later return, Night Angel Nemesis, opening the Kylar Chronicles. The pull is speed and darkness that never quite drowns the heart under it: street poverty, hard love, and the moral cost of killing for a living. Begin with The Way of Shadows and read in publication order; the trilogy comes first, and everything after answers to it.