The Blinding Knife (48 page)

And he was true to his word, though it caused grumbling. It would have been harder, Liv realized, if the army had experienced any privation. Since their food stores were still well stocked and no one had yet died in claiming plunder, it was far easier to ask the army to go without.

The prince took great care in how he seized the mines themselves. He sent soldiers to circle through the hills to capture each wooden watchtower to keep the slaves from escaping in the chaos. If he really did mean to free the slaves as he’d claimed, he meant to do it at his own pace, in his own way.

And so it was. Koios White Oak loved a spectacle. As the evening sun set the sky alight with fire, he spoke to the thirty thousand gathered slaves. All would be released immediately as soon as they listened to his few, poor words. He would clothe and feed them all tonight. They were free to go wherever they pleased so long as they didn’t steal from his people or join the Chromeria against them. Or, he said, they could march with him, and take equal shares of the plunder with the rest of his soldiers, and exact vengeance, and perhaps make enough to start a life, to earn a plot of land if they wished to farm or a grant of money if they wished to live in the cities. They had ten days to decide, but they had to decide before he assaulted Idoss. If they chose to march with the army, they would be choosing to live by the army’s rules. But it was their own choice, freely given, and they would from this day never be slaves again.

With his own hands, he struck the chains off an old slave’s hands.

It was a huge gamble, and the next day it looked like it was one that had failed spectacularly. The slaves sent to the silver mines weren’t the best and most temperate men. They were the captured pirates, the violent, the disobedient, the lazy, the rebellious. They were the kind of men who hated having rules at all, and only perhaps a tenth showed up for the drills the next morning. The army spent that day training, and only began its march at noon the next day.

By the third day, Liv realized what the prince had been betting on. The freed men, though now clothed and unbound, had no food. The Color Prince’s foragers had denuded the land of crops and livestock. No one would beat the freed men, but no one would feed them either. Of course, most of them were very familiar with privation; starving the slaves was seen as the best way to cure lustfulness and laziness. They could deal with the pain of an empty belly. For a while.

There was no traffic on the roads except other slaves, so there was no one to rob even if they wanted to. One small band had attacked the camp, making off with food, but not horses. They’d been hunted down, tied up, sprayed with red luxin, and set afire alive. As three days turned to four, large groups began traveling parallel to the slow-moving army.

On the fifth day, at dinner, thousands came into camp. They were given crusts, nothing more. Free men work for their meat, they were told. The next morning, thousands more were at the drills.

By the tenth day, twenty-two thousand men had been added to the army.

Of course, adding such huge numbers of untrained, undisciplined men to an already undertrained and undisciplined army caused huge problems. Liv would listen to the advisers bickering late into the night about it, even raising their voices to the prince. Should the slaves be put into their own units, or incorporated into existing ones? (The latter.) What was to be done about slaves who accosted women or men in the camp? (Immolation.) The slaves were all men, and only the camp overseers and their favorites—who’d all fled—had been allowed to visit the prostitutes in Thorikos. Could anything be done for them?

The prince had addressed that by bringing together representatives of the slaves, his generals, and the prostitutes—who hadn’t been organized in any sort of a guild, but did so rapidly when they were told that they could thus make a fortune. Liv’s ears burned as she listened, but the prince never asked her to leave. He got the Mother of the Companions, as the prostitutes wished to be called, to tell him how many clients their women could serve in a day. He had two-thirds that many chits made up, made of bronze, each stamped with a lewd act. Then he made up a much smaller number of silver chits that could be used for the best Companions—he left it up to the Mother to decide how she wished to choose those women. He distributed a third of the chits to the generals, a third to the head of the foragers, and a third to his bursar.

Chits were to be given to men who gave extraordinary service—either bringing in many more crops or volunteering for particularly hazardous assignments for the generals. At least half of the chits had to be distributed to slaves, and if there was any corruption in hoarding chits or dispensing them only to favorites, the corrupt man or woman would be drawn, hanged, and immolated. Then, every day, the Companions would turn in the chits for reimbursement. The last third could be purchased by anyone in the army for set prices, helping offset the subsidy for the others.

The prince said, “For the next two weeks, I want you to do your best to find ways to give out as many of these as possible, and not to the same men over and over. Give everyone a chance to earn one. After that, we’ll scale back. We don’t want riots or rapists this week, but we don’t want financial ruin next week either.”

The next day, it seemed the camp shrank by a third as the newly freed men went out on volunteer missions in every direction.

As they approached Idoss, the towns got bigger and the loot got better. None resisted until they were almost on the outskirts of Idoss itself. This city, Ergion, had a stone wall, archers, a few drafters. Liv couldn’t figure what the people of the city were thinking—Idoss, which might be defended, was only a day’s trip away for a family, two days for an army. An easy trip, when fleeing for your life. But somehow the city elders had convinced themselves they could scatter a slave army like chaff.

The headsman spat from the ramparts and instructed his archers to fire on the Color Prince when he came forward to parley. The Color Prince’s drafters deflected the arrows easily.

With drafters providing cover from the archers, their sappers—former miners, half of them—placed gunpowder charges under the wall within an hour. They blew open a hole and had the city in flames in another.

This time, the Color Prince gave orders for no quarter to be given. This would be an example, he said. He only wanted five hundred women and children left alive.

The army went mad, and Liv stayed in the camp. Even dressed as a rich drafter and well-known as she was, it wasn’t safe in Ergion for a woman alone. She didn’t want to see what the freed men were doing to their former masters anyway.

That night, a hugely muscled man whose status as a former slave
could only be noted by his sheared ear was allowed into the prince’s tent. He bowed and presented a sack. The city headsman’s head was inside.

The Color Prince gave him a handful of silver chits, looked him in the eye, and nodded. As the brute left, leaving the disfigured head oozing blood on the prince’s carpet, Koios White Oak simply said, “Amazing what a man will risk for a few minutes with the mouth of a talented woman.”

Tap, superviolet and blue. Tap, green. Tap, orange. Tap, yellow. Tap, red and sub-red.

I’ve been having these waking dreams. Before the Guiles’ War had come to Ru, my favorite little cousin Meena was given an Ilytian dragon. Everywhere she’d gone, the toy had bobbed along in the air above her, tied to her wrist with a string, never deflating in the two months she had it. Meena had skipped everywhere, singing. Seven years old, and already she’d been training for two years. Her voice had a purity that transfixed soldiers and courtiers alike, but as often as not she’d make up her own nonsense songs, skipping through town.

Meena is dead. She would have been twenty-three years old now. She wanted to go to the Chromeria with me. I told her no. Of course, her mother never would have let her go even if I’d asked. Most likely. I hadn’t tried. Meena died in General Gad Delmarta’s purge, her body tossed down the steps of the Great Pyramid along with those of the rest of our family. Fifty-seven dead at the pyramid alone. Many more within the city, though those deaths were more pedestrian, somehow mattered less—at least to my people.

I wonder if Meena would have become a drafter, a warrior like me. I had no interest in fighting until that butcher killed all my people. I became quite a warrior, though. But evidently not enough of one.

And now my time is done.

With the precision only the best blues can manage, I study the red tent that is my cell.

The battle for Garriston was to have been my last fight. Usef and I had been overwhelmed by the wights and separated from the other veteran drafters who’d volunteered to fight to the death instead of joining the Freeing.

Usef and I had fought on opposite sides of the Prisms’ War, the False Prism’s War, the War of Guiles. One of my best friends from the Chromeria killed Usef’s first wife. And Usef had killed her in turn. Usef and I had ample reason to hate each other. Instead, we’d fallen in love. Two broken warriors tired of war.

We’d chosen to make our last stand together. All the veteran drafters had been broken into pairs, each armed with a pistol and a dagger. All of us were close to breaking the halo, so whoever broke first would have their partner put them out of their madness. And if she was left alive alone, each was responsible for ending her own life.

I wondered if Usef could kill me, when it came to it. Usef was a blue, but he was also a red. It was how he’d gotten his nickname, the Purple Bear. He hated that name with a passion, thought it made him sound ridiculous. But as I pointed out, it was really the only nickname possible. Usef was six and a half feet tall, barrel-chested, burly, and hairy, with a full, wild beard and long, wild dark hair and heavy brows. He was a bear, and a red and blue disjunctive bichrome. His growling in response to people calling him the Purple Bear had only made the name stick.

Usef’s chest exploded when a shell hit the building behind them. Impossibly, he’d stood, looking for me, relieved to find me, relieved that I wasn’t injured. His mouth moved. And then he’d died.

I’d picked up my musket, and his, but instead of turning it on myself, I attacked the bastards. Found the cannon team. Massacred them. And there I broke my halo.

At first I thought I’d been hit with musket fire. I lost consciousness, and fully believed I was dying. I was content with that.

I love you, my Purple Bear.

I woke in a blacked-out wagon, sick as a dim.

Eventually, perhaps weeks later, the wagon had been commandeered for other uses and set off from Garriston. I recovered, and now find myself daily in this tent. I pick up snatches of conversation from
the soldiers and peasants who pass too close, but all I can construct is speculative. Obviously, we’re marching at the direction of this Color Prince and covering a good distance daily, despite what seems a vast caravan.

From the excitement on certain days, and the smell of smoke that isn’t woodsmoke, I know we must have cut far enough south that they avoided the Karsos Mountains, and that we have invaded Atash.

Every day, I’m chained and blindfolded carefully before we move, but otherwise I haven’t been accosted. An odd mercy. I’m on the wrong side of forty years old now, but as a warrior, I long ago prepared myself for outrages, should I be captured. Weak men like to humble women, especially great women who make them feel as inferior. I do that constantly.

So what’s the game?

I’m a formidable blue warrior, perhaps even a legend. And I’ve broken the halo.

And there it is. This Color Prince, whoever he is, wants me to join him. He thinks that the longer he lets me sit in my blueness, the more likely I am to go mad and join him.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been underestimated. I don’t like it any more now than I did as a young woman.

My tent isn’t large; I can’t stand up straight without brushing my head on the fabric. My hands are manacled in front of me, and the manacles attach to the iron collar around my neck. My legs are hobbled with chains around my ankles, held apart by an iron pole.

All in all, it gives me reasonable freedom of movement, but little possibility of attacking anyone. Truth is, I’m no Blackguard: I wouldn’t know how to attack someone with my hands even were I free. Well, I know a few punches, but that’s a far different thing than being dangerous. Truth is, without drafting, I’m simply another helpless woman.

But I’m not ready to give up drafting yet.

They haven’t taken my ring—which absolutely must mean that the Color Prince intends to recruit me. They’d taken a long, hard look at the ruby on my finger, another at the broken, pure blue halo in my eyes, and let me keep it.

It takes me two days to form my plan. The tent is red, so the light that comes through it keeps me from panicking like darkness would, but it’s worthless to me for drafting. However, the tent is also made of
cloth. Standing on tiptoe, I can pull a bit of the tent that is usually covered by the frame underneath it and gnaw on it. It takes me two days to chew a hole big enough to let in a tiny spotlight of clear, white light—but still small enough to be hidden to the eyes of those who fold up the tent every morning.

The next day, I nearly panick when I find that the hole isn’t there. But there is no punishment, no mention of it. There must be more than one blue drafter imprisoned as I am; our tents had merely been switched during the march.