The Blinding Knife (46 page)

Kip would get something for himself for once. He’d earned it. All those hours studying, memorizing decks and strategies when he could have been studying drafting instead. He’d known that he shouldn’t use the black deck trick saving Teia. He should have held on to that to save himself. He was risking his own future for her. She owed him. Without Kip, she’d belong to Andross Guile. He’d saved her from that spider. What was so wrong with wanting a little gratitude in return?

Gratitude, huh? Is
that
what you’ve been fantasizing about, Kip?

Teia set her bag down. Her voice was distant, empty. “Do you want me to wash up first? Or I could bring up hot water and we could wash together. Or… I’m sorry, Kip. I mean, my lord. I’ve never done this before. I don’t—I didn’t expect my mistress to sell me. She seemed very set—I—I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

And he had fantasized about Teia. And felt awful afterward.

Kip scrubbed his towel over his face. She was a slave. He hadn’t enslaved her; it was just how things were. All this wasn’t his idea, and he had to pay penalties for how things were, too. He hadn’t chosen to be a bastard, but he had to live with that, didn’t he? He took his lumps, it was only fair that he get some of the rewards. He deserved this. Besides, just because it was a duty didn’t mean it had to be unpleasant. Kip would be good to her. He would care about her. He would be better to her than any slave girl could hope a man would be.

Teia swallowed. “I’m a virgin, but the room slaves talked about their work—a lot.” She blushed. “I think I know what to do.” She swallowed again.

And really, what could she hope for that was better if he freed her? Did peasants have things so much better than slaves?

Temptation is a slow and subtle serpent.

I am the turtle-bear. I’m fat and ungainly and ridiculous, but at least I can be honest with myself. I want to take her because I’m terrified I’ll never get the chance to bed anyone ever again. And I’ll be nice to her because I don’t want to feel guilty afterward. It’s all lies.

Of course I want to sleep with you, Master. Of course you were good to me. Of course it’s better than a girl could have ever asked for. Of course you are kind and generous and wonderful.

If you’re not free to say no, your yes is meaningless.

“Have I displeased you?” Teia asked.

She wouldn’t be so attuned to my every mood and whim if I weren’t her master, would she?

She swallowed. “We don’t need to wash up first. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry. I’m all thumbs at this. I should shut up and—” She crossed her arms and grabbed the hem of her shirt.

Kip grabbed her arm before she could strip, stopping her. He ignored the bewildered look on her face, went to his desk, and grabbed the papers. He handed them to her, avoided her eyes.

“You’re free. I won’t be able to get it registered until the first transfer clears the embassy—I tried, but as far as I’m concerned, you don’t belong to me.” That sounded bad, for some reason. Kip rubbed his face with the towel. “No one had slaves where I grew up, so I don’t know how people usually do this, but… I don’t want to know how it works. The idea of compelling you to… to do the things that awful old man suggested… I hate myself enough already.”

“You haven’t been sleeping, have you?” Teia asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“So you haven’t.”

Kip looked away. “I have… bad dreams.” Bad dreams. That was putting it mildly. “Whether I sleep or not, I’m more tired in the morning.”

“Go to bed, Kip. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

“I’m serious, Teia.”

“Me, too. To bed,” she said firmly.

“I thought I was the master around here,” Kip said. He regretted saying it immediately, but she laughed and swatted his butt. She’d laughed a little too hard, though, obviously at least as relieved as he was.

He went to bed and, miracle of miracles, slept.

In the morning, Kip felt ridiculously well. For ten seconds. He caught himself humming.

Then he thought about the dagger.

He sponged himself clean, put on fresh clothes, and then poked his head out of his door quickly. No spies, at least none that he noticed.

He used the stairs to go down to his old barracks level. He still didn’t have a plan, but he knew he couldn’t leave a priceless relic in some random chest forever. He slipped into the barracks and walked quickly down the rows.

The bed under which he’d hidden the dagger had been claimed. The chest was moved to the foot of the bed, like all the other occupied beds. Kip’s throat clamped shut.

He threw the chest open. A change of clothes, an extra blanket, a few coins. No dagger. Oh hell. Oh hell no. Dear Orholam no.

“What are you doing in my stuff?” a voice said from the latrine doorway. It was a new boy, someone Kip had never seen before. Pimply, scrawny, birthmark on his neck.

“I had some things in this chest,” Kip said. “Where are they? What have you done with them?”

“What are you talking about? There was just the standard blanket when I got the chest. Are you stealing from me?”

“Oh shut up,” Kip said.

“You’re Breaker, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

Great. Kip didn’t say anything. He left.

He went downstairs and got in a student line. He was here during lectures, so the line was empty. The secretary obviously knew Kip was skipping lectures, too. He took his time coming over.

Kip bit his tongue.

“Are you lost, young man?” the secretary asked him. The man was holding a steaming cup of kopi.

“No, but something of mine is. Do you have an area where you keep lost items?”

“Indeed,” the man said. “What have you lost?”

Kip swallowed.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve lost a number of coins, but you can’t remember exactly how many.” The man smiled humorlessly and sipped at his kopi.

“No. Um.” Kip lowered his voice. “A knife in a sheath, about this long, white ray skin on the um, grip, some um, glass embedded in the blade?”

“You boys and your games.”

“I’m serious.”

The man took another sip of his kopi, rolled his eyes, and went to a box behind his desk. He began rummaging through old cloaks and trousers. “Slaves clean the rooms, you know. Shifty lot. No morals. Thieves half the time. You really shouldn’t leave anything out that—” He stopped speaking.

Kip heard the unmistakable sound of a blade sliding out of its sheath. His heart leapt.

The man came back to the counter and laid the blade on the counter. It was the real thing. His eyes were wide.

Kip swept it off the counter. “It might, uh, be wiser for you to not tell anyone about this,” he said. “Um, I didn’t mean that to sound like a threat. I meant it’s kind of incredibly important, so if anyone else comes looking for it, maybe you haven’t ever seen it and don’t know what they’re talking about? And if you ever find out which slave brought it here, tell them thanks. I probably owe them my life or something.”

The man sipped his kopi nonchalantly. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, though.

I don’t have anywhere to conceal a big knife.

As if it weren’t terribly conspicuous, Kip took the knife and stuck it up his sleeve, the hilt concealed as much as possible in his hand. He swallowed and tightened his belt with one hand.

Girding up my loins, I guess.

Loins. Kip didn’t like the word.

The secretary cleared his throat. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.

Oh, Kip was stalling.

“No. Thanks again.” Then he was off.

He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t have any safe place to put something worth a fortune, but he found himself walking toward Janus Borig’s house. She had things that were worth a fortune, hidden in plain sight. Maybe she could give him some advice.

When he got to the entry hall, he realized that everyone coming inside was soaking wet. He thought about going back up to his room and getting a cloak, but his room could well have a spy on it, and he already was doing a bad job of protecting the dagger. Getting lucky once was great, but expecting it to happen again was too much.

He’d just have to get wet. Orholam knew he had enough insulation
to keep warm. He braced himself against the downpour and started jogging.

When he reached Janus Borig’s house, sopping wet and freezing cold, he found the door bashed in, torn off its hinges, the iron twisted and ripped. He smelled something in the air. Blood. Blood and smoke.

Kip could feel fear trying to paralyze him, but fear was slow. Fear could only perch on his shoulders and spread its black wings over his face if he gave it a place to roost. It flew around his head, stabbing its bloody beak for his eyes, but Kip was faster. He burst inside.

He ran into something as he stepped through the torn door. Something yielding and invisible. Not something. Someone.

Kip’s weight did something useful for once, and he fell forward, staggering into Janus Borig’s house and knocking over the invisible figure. He saw the flash of a trouser leg through an open cloak, as the man tumbled over a shattered bookshelf.

There was a small explosion of cards. The man must have had his hands full of them, and as he hit the ground, they went everywhere.

Then, in a rustle of cloth, he
disappeared
.

Kip jumped to his feet, slipped on the trash on the floor, and saw dead bodies. Armed men, perhaps half a dozen, all uniformed in black with a silver shield embroidered on their chests. Janus Borig’s guards. All the dead were her guards. They hadn’t killed anyone in return.

The sound of steel being drawn cut through the muted hiss of the rain and wind outside.

Kip widened his eyes to the sub-red spectrum—and the invisible man snapped into focus. Cloaked but still radiating more heat than his surroundings. He was walking straight toward Kip, not bothering to lower his own center of gravity. Kip must look like easy meat.

Looking around frantically like he had no idea what was going on, Kip waited until the cloaked man stepped closer. Apparently the cloak
only concealed what was beneath it, so the man had only a short sword, and he couldn’t lift it until the last second or it would be revealed, hanging in midair. So the man walked forward, sword point down.

When the man was within two paces, Kip screamed. He leapt toward the man and to the side, left arm sweeping in a block that batted the man’s sword arm even as it came up, and his right hand burying his own dagger in the man’s chest.

Sub-red was bad for making out detail, or Kip was just clumsy, because his feet landed on books and apple cores and flew out from under him. He lost his dagger.

He popped back up to his feet, the battle rush making him shake. The invisible man was now very much visible, flopped on his back, arms wide, unmoving, Kip’s dagger staked straight through his chest.

Kip looked around frantically. Janus had had a thousand muskets in here. Why couldn’t he find any of them now? Nothing seemed to be on fire now, though the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. He also smelled the resinous, fresh cedar smell of green luxin. They’d smothered fires with luxin. Fires. Janus Borig had said she’d booby-trapped the cards upstairs. Maybe she’d laid traps down here, too.

“Vox?!” a woman’s voice shouted from upstairs. “What was that?”

Snatching up his dagger from the dead man, Kip charged up the steps, as stealthy as a rhinoceros falling onto a crate of porcelain. The woman was standing at the wall of cards, pulling them down, sticking them into a wooden case with dividers, but she was already looking alarmed when Kip came into her view. She dropped the case onto a table and pulled her cloak around herself.

Without noticing, Kip had let his eyes go back to normal vision, and he saw the briefest glimpse of the upper room. Janus Borig lay in a bloody heap by her desk, dead. One smooth section of the wall had been broken open, revealing a hiding place that must have held cards or other treasures, and half the wall was bare.

The shimmer came toward him, and he relaxed his eyes. The invisible woman became a warm glow, coming fast toward him, raising her short sword at the last second. These assassins must be used to easy kills, because when Kip dodged, she was so surprised she didn’t even try to adjust. He spun as he jumped past her and lashed out.

His dagger brushed something and then pulled through. Kip thought—hoped—that it was the side of her neck. He crouched low, out in the middle of the room.

“You’re a sub-red,” she said. “Always hated sub-reds.” She shimmered back into visibility. She was a petite woman, blonde hair and pale skin, blue eyes made mostly green by drafting. Eyes narrow, face like a ferret. Her hair was pulled back into two braids. One of them had been cut halfway through by Kip’s dagger. She drew a pistol.

Kip snatched up Janus’s little chair and threw it at the assassin. She jumped aside, but had already pulled her trigger. The gun roared, its sound amplified in the small room. A series of loud whines, one on top of the other, rang out as the lead ball ricocheted off the walls.