The Blinding Knife (20 page)

For a girl who was a slave and a color-blind drafter of a useless color, that was like the impossible dream, dangled in front of her nose. She’d been ordered to join the Blackguard by her owner, she’d been trained for it for years at the direction of others and for the profit of others—but now she wanted it for herself, for her own reasons. And she wanted it with all her heart.

Kip and Teia finished their laps—for Teia punching a boy who’d dismissed her as a ‘little girl,’ this time—and had no time to clean up before heading to practicum: drafting practice, Teia called it. She seemed to dread it. Kip was looking forward to it—even if he was a sweaty, stinky mess.

As usual, Teia led the way. It was on a different floor than their other class, sun side of the Prism’s Tower. But when they got to the room, Kip saw that Grinwoody was waiting outside the door.

Oh no.

“Kip,” the wizened slave said. “You’re late. The Red will not be pleased.”

And I care so much about his pleasure. “What does he want with me?” Kip asked.

“You’ve been summoned.”

“What if I don’t want to go?” Kip asked.

Grinwoody’s eyebrows tented. “You wish me to communicate your refusal to the Red?” His belief that Kip was a buffoon was written all over his face. The man clearly didn’t like him, and now that Kip had been disavowed, he felt no need to hide it.

It made Kip want to dig in his heels and tell the man to go to hell.

“Kip?” Teia said. She waited.

Kip looked over at her.

Teia said, “Don’t be an idiot.”

Kip frowned. “Let’s go,” he told Grinwoody.

He followed the man up to Andross Guile’s room and found himself trying to hold on to his anger, but getting more and more nervous. Grinwoody opened the door and gestured to the heavy blackout curtains.

So help me, if that old bastard hits me today, I’m hitting him back.

Kip was pretty certain that he would do no such thing, but it made him feel better to think it. He stepped inside.

Cloying odors. Old man and incense. Dust and sour armpits. Oh, that last was
him
.

“You reek,” a voice said in the darkness, thick with distaste.

“So do you,” Kip shot back. Brain engaging two seconds late.

Silence. Then: “Sit.”

“On the ground?” Kip asked.

“What are you, a monkey?”

“More monster than monkey. You and I are related, after all,” Kip said.

Silence again. Longer this time. “I’d forgotten how reckless the young can be. But perhaps you’re not rash, perhaps you’re simply stupid. Sit. In the chair.”

Kip groped around in the darkness until he found the chair. He sat.

“Grinwoody!” the old man barked.

The slave came in and hung something on a hook above Kip’s head. He left wordlessly.

“Lantern,” Andross Guile said.

Lantern? But it wasn’t on. Was Kip supposed to light it? Wouldn’t that defeat the whole point of sitting in a darkened room with blackout curtains over every window and door? Besides, Kip didn’t have so much as a flint.

Was it a drafting test to see if Kip could—

Moron. It’s a superviolet lantern.

Kip tightened his pupils, and the room jumped into alien, violet, superfine relief. It was a larger room than he’d thought. Portraits of the Guiles’ ancestors hung on every wall. Viewed solely in superviolet light, the portraits were lifeless, monochrome. Kip could distinguish the ridges and bumps from the brushstrokes, but seeing the faces made thereby was more difficult. There was an enormous four-poster bed barely visible through the doors in a second chamber, and of course the heavy velvet curtains everywhere. Ivory and marble sculptures sat on the mantel, on the harpsichord. Kip couldn’t pick a single style from all the art, but it all seemed very, very fine.

There were a number of chairs, divans, and tables. A clock with spinning gears and a swinging pendulum of the kind Kip had only heard of.

Last, Kip looked at the man in front of him, expecting some horror. Despite the darkness, Andross Guile wore enormous dark spectacles. He’d been a big man, before age robbed him. His shoulders were still broad, but skinny. His hair, flat, desaturated violet in the lantern light, must be silvery gray, almost white. It was sparse, disheveled—befitting a man who lived without mirrors. His skin, too, was washed out, loose. Naturally darker than Gavin’s, but bleached by age. His
nose straight, deep wrinkles. There was an old scar along his neck up onto his jawline.

He had been a handsome man. Clearly a Guile.

“You play Nine Kings?” Andross Guile asked.

“My mother never had that kind of money,” Kip said. It was a card game. The cards themselves were often worth their weight in gold.

“But you know how to play.”

“I’ve watched others.”

“The deck lies before you,” Andross Guile said. “Let it not be said I’m not fair: the first game will have no stakes.”

“It will not be said,” Kip said. He picked up his deck, and was hit with another reminder of how different of a world he’d stepped into. Depending on the seriousness of the players, there were many different variants of Nine Kings. There were more than seven hundred cards, from which each player constructed his own deck. In villages like Rekton, soldiers passing through might have a deck built by a small-town artist. The main requirement there was that the cards should have no markings on the back side by which players could cheat and draw the card of their choice. Nobles would play with cards made by artists and drafters together at one of the six branches of the Card Guild. Those cards were beautifully drawn and lacquered with blue luxin, guaranteeing every one was uniform.

These weren’t those cards. Each card was electrum—a mixture of gold and silver. Parian cuneiform numbers denoted each strength and ability, and each was adorned with masterful art and signed. Some were inlaid with tiny jewels. All were sealed with perfect crystalline yellow luxin. Jeweled knucklebones and ivory counters and stained glass sand clocks completed the set.

Kip tried to ignore the treasure in his hands and awkwardly shuffled the cards.

“How’d you cripple yourself?” Andross Guile asked. He was expertly shuffling his own cards.

Kip was surprised the old man asked. “I got robbed. I fought, and someone pushed me into a fire. I caught myself with this.” Kip held up his hand, then realized he was holding up his hand to a blind man. “Um, my hand. The wood was still hot.”

“ ‘Still hot’?”

“Oh, I drafted the fire when I fought them.”

Andross Guile
mm
ed that.

They played, and Kip lost spectacularly, barely even recalling the rules. He could hardly decipher the Parian numbers because he’d only just learned them from seeing the Blackguard scrubs stand in order. Andross, on the other hand, played blind. His cards had small bumps and ridges on the face that must have been code to tell him what the card was. It wasn’t cheating, and it wasn’t any advantage, but it told Kip that the makers of the cards were making them specifically with Andross Guile in mind.

No wonder Kip hadn’t done any damage at all to Andross. The man was serious about his game.

The old man was expressionless, though. “Another. This time, there are stakes.”

“What are they?” Kip asked.

“High,” the old man said.

“I don’t have any money,” Kip said.

“I know what you have.”

Kip thought instantly of the dagger. Chose to ignore it. Chose to answer as if it were obvious that he had nothing at all. “Then what are we playing for?”

“You’ll find out when we finish. Play to win.”

Kip took a deep breath and played better the second time, but still got massacred. When his last knucklebone turned over to zero, Andross Guile sat back and folded his hands over his little paunch.

“Today, you sat with a small group of young people who call themselves the Rejects. Among them was a girl named Tiziri. It was observed that you made no particular connection with her.”

Kip remembered her. She was the homely girl at the table. Big smile, overweight, birthmark across her face. “What are you going to do?” Kip asked.

“Her parents sold six of their fifteen cattle to pay for her passage to the Chromeria. She’s going home tomorrow. Because of you.”

“What? Why? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not fair!”

“You lost,” Andross Guile said. “We’ll play again. Next time the stakes will be higher.”

“And you,” the Third Eye said, turning to Karris, “The Wife. You’re not right either.”

“Excuse me?” Karris said.

Gavin felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach, so it was nice to see Karris equally stunned.

But the Third Eye looked genuinely confused. “What are you here for, Prism?”

“I have fifty thousand refugees in need of a home. If I put them anywhere else, they’ll either be held hostage to the politics of satrapies, or massacred outright by the Color Prince.”

“You plan to put them here?”

“You’re the Seer.”

“You’ll destroy the community we’ve built here,” she said.

“You built a community to serve Orholam. Serve him by saving his people.”

“You don’t even know what you’re destroying,” she said.

“Nor is it in me to care overmuch. When the emperor sends a ship to Paria, he doesn’t concern himself with the comfort of the rats in the hold. If you want to serve Orholam, start putting together food. ‘Faith without deeds is dust,’ is it not? Fifty thousand starving people are going to arrive in three days.”

The men surrounding Gavin and Karris bristled. He shouldn’t have said it, but the sun was up and he needed every minute of daylight to finish the harbor before the fleet arrived. They would most likely have run out of food today. If he didn’t clear the coral and make a safe port, the ships would run aground, the men and women and children die.

“Are you a man or a god, Gavin Guile?” the Third Eye asked.

“I’m
busy
,” Gavin said. “Join me or get out of the way, because I’m going to do what I will, and if you oppose me, I’ll do what I must.”

“I don’t think I like you very much, Gavin Guile.”

“In another time, I think you would. Now pardon me, but I’ve a harbor to build.”

“Dinner,” the Third Eye said. “After the sun has set, of course. Join me for dinner. You’ve given me much to think about, and I would like
to return the favor. Unless dining with
a rat
is beneath you?” She lifted a challenging, cool eyebrow.

A very palpable hit. “I would be… delighted,” Gavin said.

He walked down the beach, drawing in light. He stripped off his tunic. It wasn’t so warm yet that it was necessary, but he wanted the Third Eye and her men to see the waves of color flooding through his skin as he walked away. Yellow first, making his body glow golden. He threw a spout of yellow up into the air, and had it formed into a skimmer by the time it hit the waves.

Karris stepped onto the skimmer with him. “Not sure why you always put yourself in a position where you have to turn your back on armed men,” she said.

“All the world is armed,” Gavin said. “I’ve got to have my back to half of it.”

She grunted. “Which means I walk backwards a lot.”

He looked over at her. She was smirking.

“You’re not mad at me?” he said. He thought he could have handled things better.

“You’re the Prism,” she said, making a gesture as she said “the Prism,” as if the words themselves sparkled. “How can I be mad at the Prism?”

He laughed. He spent his whole life with women, and he still didn’t understand them. “No, really,” he said.

She joined him on the oars. “I don’t know what your ultimate objective is with Tyrea’s refugees. I’m sure you have some endgame in mind. But I don’t care. You really are doing this to save people who right now don’t have anything to give you in return. People who are terribly inconvenient. People you
could
ignore. You’re not ignoring them. That’s—that’s a good thing. I don’t need to take that away from you.”

So there’s something in you that
wants
to take it away from me, though. “Thank you,” Gavin said. He meant it, but his heart ached, too.

One year. Maybe it’s a good thing I’ve only got one year left. I don’t think I could take this for another five.

They worked, and gradually the pain faded. Gavin drafted the great posts that would support the seawalls. There was more blasting to clear the sea floor and dig deep enough to give the posts a solid foundation, but it was mostly brute drafting. Layers of yellow for strength and green for flexibility. He would have loved to use blue, but he thought this would work.

By night, they’d finished all the posts. Tomorrow, the seawalls. The next day finishing touches and double-checking that everything was working the way he’d intended. Then he could get the hell out of here.

They rowed to shore after sunset. Gavin was thinking that after today’s labors, he should probably bathe before meeting for dinner with the Seer.