The Blinding Knife (7 page)

The tiger shark is circling me, dorsal fin cutting beautiful arcs on the open water. I’m on the edge of the wreckage. I got out first, saw that the fires were headed for the powder magazine. But being on the
edge means that shark don’t have to go through the distraction of all the other meat to get to me.

“Ceres! Easy, Ceres. Come on now!”

I turn constantly, keeping my face to the beastie. Sharks are cowards—like to pull you down from behind. These big bastards float along with these tiny little moves, like soaring buzzards, making you think they’re ponderous, but when they strike, their speed is pants-drenching. The wedge-shaped head circles a bit closer, veers. And… now!

Gunner is the master of timing. None finer. Got to be when the seas are bucking under your feet and the linstock is in hand, slow match smoking, breathing burning saltpeter and lye in your face like a lover’s breath, and a corvette is pulling to broadside and if your chain shot doesn’t take her mast this time, she’s going to sink you and geld you and sell you as a galley slave after you’ve been made a bung boy for every man on deck with a grudge and a hunger.

I kick, stabbing one foot hardened to leather and bone by a life barefoot right at the tiger shark’s nose. I see a flash of the milky membrane over its eyes as I’m thrown, almost lifted out of the water by the force of its strike.

The shark shivers, stunned. Sensitive nose, my father told me. Looks like he told me right.

Gunner ain’t no easy meat.

“Ceres! You think I did this? I didn’t! It was the Prism! Gavin Guile! That damn boy blew up the ship, not me. Go get
him
, you dumb broad!” Ceres hates it when you dirty her face with exploded ship, and I’ve done that more than a time or three.

The shark recovers, darts away. For one second, I think I’m safe, that Ceres is going to be reasonable. There’s other meat out there. Then the shark turns, starts swimming back.

This is grudge. This is Ceres herself. And she’s used to crushing those who defy her by sheer brute force.

“Ceres! Don’t do this!”

I got a pistol still. Lost my musket when it blew up in my hands during the fight with the Prism and his Blackguards—which is infuriating, impossible, I’ve never double-charged a musket in my life. But that’s something to worry about later. The pistol might even still work, despite my plunge into the water. I’ve been trying to make a pistol that’s proof against Ceres’s spit for years. Nothing’s worked
against a full plunge, though, and shooting into the water is a fool’s game anyway. Ceres’s sea skin shields her kin. So I pull my knife instead, its blade three hands long.

“Damn you, Ceres. I said I was sorry!” Sea demons are Ceres’s sons. I killed one, years back. She hain’t forgiven me yet. Won’t, until I sacrifice something surreptitiously special.

The tiger shark comes straight at me. No subtlety, and I got her timing now.

She strikes, and my heels collide with her soft nose one more time. This time, I absorb some of the blow in my knees, still giving the beast a good shock, but not letting myself be thrown so far. I stab for the eye, miss, and bury the knife in its gills. Pull it out with a crimson gush following the blade like fire from a cannon’s throat.

A mortal blow, but not a fast death. Damn. Meant it to be quick.

The wound stains the water in the high sun, and the tiger shark veers away. I swim like a furious goddess is on my heels. I get to the dinghy just as some younger tiger sharks arrive. They’re shorter than Ceres’s hellhound, their stripes more pronounced.

It’s a miracle the dinghy survived—a miracle only slightly tainted by the fact that
there’s no goddam oars
. I stand up, wide-legged, see that there are other men swimming for the dinghy. The first is a Parian with something shy of six teeth. His name is Conner, and for good reason.

That damned shovel head has got his grubby paws on two oars. He don’t look pleased to see that I’m in the dinghy already.

“You look wet,” I says. I got no oars, but I’m not swimming with sharks. And sharks don’t eat oars.

“First mate,” Conner says. “You’re captain. And we need us a crew. Take it or leave it. The winds and waves aren’t like to blow you to shore from here.”

He’s quick. Always hated that about Conner. Dangerous one, he is. Still, how good of a con man can he be? He let hisself get daubbed
Conner
.

“Hand me the oars then, First Mate, so I can help you up,” I says.

“Go to hell.”

“That was an order,” Gunner says.

“Go to hell,” Conner says, louder, heedless of the tigers.

I give in. I never give in.

Conner insists on holding the oars as I pull him in the dinghy—which
is good. It keeps his hands busy while I stick my knife through his back, pinning him to the gunwale.

Even as the men watching from the water curse, surprised at the sudden betrayal, I pry the oars from Conner’s fingers. He’s dead already, hands convulsed, locked tight. I have to use the butt of my pistol to smash his grip open and drop the oars into the dinghy.

I stand easily despite the dinghy bobbing like a cork in the waves. I hold my pistol, waving it carelessly as I address the swimming, desperate men who’ve just seen me murder Conner.

“I am Gunner!” I shout, more to Ceres than to the men in the water. “I have done what satraps and Prisms only dream. I am cannoneer of the legendary
Aved Barayah
! I am sea demon slayer! Shark killer! Pirate! Rogue! And now, I am captain.
Captain
Gunner is on the look for a crew,” I say, finally turning to the men swimming, scared, surrounded by sharks. I rip my knife free of the gunwale and Conner’s body drops into the hungry sea. “Must be willing to take orders!”

“I hope you got your rest, little Guile,” a short, thick Blackguard woman named Samite said. She was stationed with him near the back of their column of Blackguards. The galleass had just arrived at Big Jasper this morning, and the Blackguards were the first off. “It’s going to be a long day for you.”

Rest? Kip had been trying to figure out how to conceal his big secret, his inheritance, the last and only gift his mother had ever given him. He had a large, ornate jeweled white dagger that no one knew about, and he had a large, ornate polished dagger box. He could put the dagger in the dagger box, of course, but some paranoid corner of his brain was certain that the first thing a person would ask when they saw the box was if he would open it.

How could he say no?

So late into the night, he’d sat in his little bunk in the darkness, trying not to wake the Blackguards sleeping in the other bunks. He’d
found twine and he tied the dagger to his back, a process that took a good ten minutes with his bandaged hand. Its point hung down to his butt, under his clothes, held in place by his belt.

It wasn’t a great solution, but it was the best he could come up with. After his night, a long day was just what he needed now. Still, he mustered a rueful smile for Samite. She was nice, despite her crooked, oft-broken nose and prominently missing front tooth. She was short and solid as a seawall.

They were some of the last to join the column, and once formed up, the Blackguards set off at a slow jog.

Kip thought that he wouldn’t be quite as awestruck the second time he saw the Chromeria. He was wrong. He was still awed even by Big Jasper Island, which was entirely covered by a city. The city was all multicolored domes on top of whitewashed square buildings. Every intersection was adorned with a tower at the top of which hung a mirror, polished and geared so that the mirror could direct sunlight or even moonlight into any part of the city. The Thousand Stars, they called them. The streets were laid out in straight lines with mathematical precision so as to cut off as few beams of light as possible.

Seeing him studying the structures, Samite said, “There is no darkness on Big Jasper, they like to say.” She grinned her gap-toothed grin. “Not literally true, but more true here than anywhere else in the world.”

Kip nodded, saving his air for the jogging. In simply looking over at her for an instant, he almost collided with a black-robed luxiat.

The streets were packed with thousands of people—not for market day or any particular holy day, Kip realized. This was normal for Big Jasper. And the people themselves came from every arc of the Seven Satrapies. Red-haired pale savages from deep within the Blood Forest to woolen-doublet-wearing midnight Ilytians, light-skinned Ruthgari in their wide straw hats to shield them from the sun, Abornean men and women virtually indistinguishable from each other in their layers of silks and earrings.

But regardless of their lineage, the people on the streets had one thing in common: their awe for the Blackguards with whom Kip was jogging. People got out of the way for them, and the Blackguards took it as their due.

At first, Kip tried not to look too conspicuously out of place among all the hard-muscled physiques around him, but soon he was just trying to keep up.

“Don’t worry,” Samite said. Infuriatingly, despite her own body being nearly as wide as it was tall, she wasn’t even breathing hard. “If you can’t keep up, we have orders to carry you.”

Carry me? The mortification of the mental image was enough to keep Kip going. Plus, if they carried him, they’d discover the dagger.

Finally they crossed the Lily’s Stem, the transparent blue-and-yellow-luxin-covered bridge between Little Jasper Island and Big Jasper Island.

Ironfist gave some sort of signal that Kip didn’t see as the Blackguards came into the great yard between the six outer towers of the Chromeria, and the troop disappeared in half a dozen different directions. Kip leaned over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his wind. He flinched, bit back a curse, and took his weight off his left hand.

“Concealed weapons are most useful if you can draw them on short notice,” Samite said.

Kip stood up abruptly. Of course. Leaning forward had pressed the outline of the dagger against his clothes, and because of their work, of all people, Blackguards would be the best at noticing concealed weapons.

Excellent, Kip. Outstanding. You couldn’t even hide the dagger for one hour.

Still, she said nothing further.

Kip looked after the departing Blackguards. Ironfist was gone, too. “Uh, what am
I
supposed to do?” he asked Samite.

“I’ll take you to your new quarters, and then to your lectures.”

Kip’s stomach dropped. A class full of people who all knew each other and would stare at him when he came in. He’d be dropped into the middle of some subject he knew nothing about, and he’d look stupid. He swallowed.

I’ve seen a sea demon, faced color wights, been in battle, and killed… and I’m nervous about being the new boy. Kip grimaced, but it still didn’t make him feel any better.

He followed Samite up into the central tower, up one of the counterweighted lifts. “You get the layout before?” she asked.

“The commander took me straight to the Threshing. Not really.”

“We don’t have time today, sadly. I like watching the fresh meat gawk.” She grinned, but it was friendly. “In short, each tower houses its own color of drafters and most of the training facilities for them,
though everyone shares some barracks, some offices, some storerooms, some libraries. At the base of each tower there are more specialized functions: under the blue tower are the smelters and glass furnaces, under the green are gardens and menageries, under the red is the mirth hall and conservatories, under the yellow is the infirmary and discipline areas, under sub-red are the kitchens and the stockyards, under the Prism’s Tower is the great hall. Got it?”

He hoped she was joking. He smiled uncertainly as they stepped out into an empty level, not far up. She walked him down the hall and opened an oak door to a barracks. “Find an empty bed,” she said.

There was no one inside, empty pallets stretching from wall to wall. At the foot of each one was a chest for personal items.

“Please tell me there isn’t some kind of pecking order for who gets what bed,” Kip said.

“There isn’t some kind of pecking order for who gets what bed,” she said in a monotone.

“You’re lying?” he asked.

“Correct.”

“What’s the worst bed in the room?”

“In the back. Farthest from the door.”

Kip began walking to the last bed when he realized something. He stopped. “I don’t really have any stuff.” He only had a cloak, the ornate knife box, and the knife.

Samite cleared her throat.

“What?”

“You’re not going to class armed.”

Oh hell.

“We’ll also be taking you to the tailors to get you Chromeria garb.”

What was he supposed to do? Leave a priceless dagger in a barracks? Samite only knew that he had a knife. They’d just left a war zone, so that was no surprise. But if he showed it to her, she’d surely report it. He had to make it uninteresting even to her.

“I’m going to, um, have to take off my shirt to get my knife off. Can, uh, you turn your back?” Kip asked.

She turned her back, without even making any cracks or grinning.

Kip moved quickly to his pallet and stripped off his shirt and untied the dagger. He pulled the shirt back on and folded his cloak clumsily. He opened the chest. Inside was a thin, folded blanket. Kip set the cloak and the dagger box into his chest, and put the chest at the foot of the bed.