The Broken Eye (14 page)

He grinned suddenly. A fat miserable disappointment—who had, albeit with lots of qualifiers, killed a king, saved the Prism, and killed a god. Not bad for a fatty. Hell, he’d even outsmarted Andross Guile once.

Odd that he thought of outsmarting Andross Guile as more impressive than killing a god.

The god thing felt like luck, though, or like Orholam had surveyed the field for a suitable tool to keep his Prism alive, and finding none suitable, had picked up Kip because he was closest.

Kip paused.

I treat myself pretty shitty, he thought. I’d never let anyone treat a friend of mine this way.

An hour later, he found a stream. He drank, hoping the water was good. Truth was, he didn’t have much choice. He slowly drank more, waiting to make sure it didn’t make him throw up, and then sipping more. He stood, wishing he had a waterskin.

He caught sight of his green luxin boots. Golly, if only I had some way to make a waterskin!

With a sigh, he drafted a green bag. Magic first, magic always, Kip. He scooped up a great volume of water, then bent the green until it fit comfortably across his back. Drafted straps that fit his shoulders, drafted a belt.

Magic. So useful, it’s like … magic.

“Talking to this madman is making me crazy!” Kip said.

Funny. You’ll know you’re almost finished when you forget it’s supposed to be ironic.

He decided while he was walking, he could catch up on all the
practica
he’d missed. Unfortunately, at his level, the Blackguard training had consisted almost purely of hand-to-hand combat, the idea being that such was the foundation for all their future training. On the ships traveling to Ruic Head, they’d been taught proper grips and basic handling of swords and how to reload muskets. The other new Blackguard inductees already knew it all. Some of them had been training with weapons for years. Some were proficient with bows and other weapons that Kip had barely even picked up. He was way, way behind.

But I can go green golem.

Fat lot of good that does me now.

He felt like the coast was swooping out to a point, but looking at the sun alone wasn’t enough to confirm his suspicions. His classmate Ben-hadad had once said that he’d learned to draft a sextant so he would never be lost. Of course, you still needed a compass, too, and while you could draft a housing and a medium on which to float a bit of philosophers’ stone, there was no such thing as lodestone luxin. Some things still had to be done the hard way.

And easy or hard, Kip didn’t have any of the skills that would have saved him. This was what losing one game of Nine Kings had cost him—his grandfather had forbidden Kip to attend practica.

Kip was trying to intuit what others had studied for generations. Well? Am I a genius of magic, or not?

Wait! Why am I messing about thinking about sextants and compasses and waterskins? I should be making a skimmer. He’d seen it done. He’d even helped propel one.

But a failure with a complicated device like the skimmer would leave him in the middle of the sea, with no way to get out. Kip could float, but it wasn’t like he was going to drift to Big Jasper, and if he tried Gavin’s jetting trick to swim, he’d break the halo before he got halfway there.

I can draft all these colors. It’s as if I’ve got a toolbox full of every imaginable tool, and I’m too stupid to use them.

Too ignorant, perhaps, a kinder voice answered him.

It was true. You wouldn’t blame a savage for the fact that he can’t read.

But you wouldn’t trust him with reading you letters, either.

The light began to fade, and Kip turned his mind to different problems. He found a clean area of the beach, just at the edge, where the palm trees gave him shelter. He took off his water pack. Staring at the darkening sky, he gathered enough blue to draft a blue luxin box with a single hole in the top, and sealed it. Then, standing on the beach facing the sinking sun, he gathered as much red as he could, patiently, slowly. The passions of red flooded through him, but he ignored them and simply filled the blue box. He filled the box full with the version of red luxin called pyrejelly.

He hadn’t been thinking clearly, and by the time the box was full there wasn’t enough heat coming from the sun to give Kip sub-red. He’d need to light his fire manually. It took him half an hour in the fading light to find a rock that looked like flint.

He banged rocks together for another half hour. Nothing sparked. He wanted to scream. He hitched his pants up and sat, rubbing his face. He tightened his belt, and saw that he was past the last, tightest hole. Not six months ago, he’d been at the loosest hole on the belt, praying he didn’t get any fatter because he didn’t know where he’d get the money or the leather for a new belt. All the rest of his clothing had been replaced at the Chromeria, but it had seemed wasteful to get rid of his belt. Besides, his mother had given it to him, during one of her rare sober spells.

Kip pulled the belt off. One of the flints had a sharp point that he could use to scratch out a new hole.

He looked at the buckle. The
metal
buckle. If he could punch himself in the stupid, he would knock it to Sun Day. Kip scratched the buckle against the flint he’d found, and wonder of wonders, it sparked. He lit the pyrejelly with no problem. It burned nicely. Kip sat and pulled his water pack to himself as the stars came out. Maybe some water would take the edge off his hunger.

The green luxin pack was sealed. Kip hadn’t drafted any way to open it. If it had been light out, he could have drafted more green and simply opened the green luxin and re-drafted it shut. Instead, he had to treat it as a purely physical object.

He wanted to cry. Or scream. Or throw a fit. Instead, eventually, Kip dug a hole in a weak part of the water bag with the sharp flint. Holding the pack over his head, he was able to drink from the warm stream of water until he filled himself.

Kip’s lamp guttered as the pyrejelly burned below the level of the hole. With no wick to pull the jelly up to the air, the fire starved and went out. Kip looked at it like it had personally betrayed him. He could smash the blue lamp holding the jelly, of course. He’d not made it very thick. But then the pyrejelly would burn off in perhaps a half an hour. If Kip had his spectacles, he could use that firelight to—he didn’t. Those were back on the ship. He’d not been wearing the lens holster the night Gavin had almost been killed.

He took that dagger for me. Kip had thought that Gavin liked him, approved of him like you approve of a well-trained pet. A sane man might risk danger to save his dog, but only an idiot would die for a dog, right? Gavin Guile was no idiot. He knew his worth in the scheme of things, and things couldn’t have been going better for him—he’d just married Karris, just turned a decisive defeat at the hands of the Color Prince into a narrow victory. Kip had seen it in his eyes, as Kip had revealed Andross was a red wight and attacked him. Gavin had known. Known about his father, for one. He’d shown no surprise. He’d been keeping that card in his hand, to play at the right time. And Kip had shouted it out to the world—Kip the Lip, saying exactly what he thought, speaking without thinking, endangering plans he couldn’t even fathom.

But Gavin had also known—in that moment, Kip had seen it—as they scrambled, four men, fighting over two blades, that Kip didn’t have the leverage to stop Andross and Grinwoody from burying the knife in his chest. What Kip hadn’t seen then, but knew now, was that with how their hands were interlaced, the only direction Gavin could pull the blade that wouldn’t be blocked was toward himself. He’d done it on purpose. He hadn’t stabbed himself, of course—he wasn’t suicidal—but once the blade’s direction had changed, Grinwoody and Andross had pushed hard instantly, not knowing, or not being able to stop, or not caring.

Why would Gavin save me, knowing the cost was his own life?

Gavin gave his life for me. The Prism himself, the best Prism in centuries, maybe ever. What did that mean? What did that say about Kip’s worth?

The thought was too big. The emotions welling up behind it too frightening. Kip was that lost kid whose mother had forgotten him in a closet full of rats. He wasn’t …

A tear dropped from his cheek and hit his protruding stomach. Where had that come from?

He rubbed the tears away with a grubby paw, bear once more.

And what the hell had happened with that knife anyway? The Blinder’s Knife, Andross Guile had called it. A knife that didn’t kill Gavin, but grew inside him instead. And how did my mother get such a thing?

That was better, safer, cerebral. Kip could think about that. But not, it turned out, for long. He was exhausted. He hadn’t drafted a pallet to sleep on, a blanket—could you make a blanket out of luxin?—or any kind of shirt. He hadn’t prepped any of the mundane bedding that might have made his sleep more comfortable, either. He broke the top of the blue luxin lamp and scraped a spark into it.

My father loves me. Of all men, Gavin Guile thinks I’m worth saving.

The luxin lit with a whoosh, and Kip felt waves of warmth beating back the night’s cold. The fire would not last long, but Kip figured he’d be asleep by then.

He was right. No sooner had his bare shoulder touched the sand than he began to dream of beasts and gods.

Chapter 13

~The Ex-Priest~

“War is always an excuse for the monstrous,” Auria tells me. We’ve climbed high enough we can’t see the raiders’ torches anymore. The light filtering through the fog on the headland is weak, but rising.

“Anyone who kills Angari is doing Orholam’s work,” I say.

“Darjan, all are his children, even the disobedient, and what you’re planning is forbidden,” Auria says. Her dark curls are matted with blood, her face blanched from its usual mahogany—from the bad light, I hope, and not from blood loss. I know it isn’t fear. Auria has never been afraid in her life. There are a hundred good reasons why I should listen to her. Karris Shadowblinder herself—Lucidonius’s own widow and heir—put Auria over me in our training. She’s older than me. Wiser, too.

But I’m stronger.

“I hate waiting for the light,” I say. I have a pair of Lucidonius’s marvelous spectacles, crafted by his own hand. Since he’s passed, you’d think they’re holy relics with how everyone treats them. Well made, though, anyone would admit. And utterly revolutionary. It hadn’t been that no one had thought of melting metal ores into molten glass for their color, it was that they couldn’t get the fires hot enough, couldn’t get the ores pure enough. Lucidonius had solved that, too, showing himself to be a mundane genius as well as a magical one. He’d been infuriating that way, but those lenses had changed everything, for drafters everywhere. A lens grinder, their mighty Lucidonius. In addition to everything else. Changing our lives in a thousand ways. Drawing us along behind him like leaves in a gale.

And leaving a terrible mess when the storm passed.

“As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation,” I intone. Lucidonius preached that, and became powerful, more powerful than the pagan priests and prophets. Pagan priests like me. I begin drafting.

I was a
kaptan
of the
aħdar qassis gwardjan
. Lucidonius’s words had somehow changed my heart, but I still wonder if they ever changed my mind. Or maybe it was the other way around. His words were enough to make me give up my comfort, my position, my place, my prestige, but now as I look down toward my new home, where doubtless the streets run red with the blood of my new neighbors and only friends, I think perhaps Orholam didn’t change me enough.

Every color is from Orholam, Lucidonius had said, holding a prism above his head as he preached peace and brotherhood between colors and countries. It had made sense to many, but perhaps especially to those like me, who can draw more than one color. In my land, my mastery of green had always been praised, but my use of blue condemned by my brother
qassisin
. Even though it made me a better
gwardjan
.

Maybe none of it made sense. Maybe Lucidonius was merely more right than those who’d come before him. Maybe what I’m about to do isn’t a sin against Orholam, that odd desert god who lives in the sky and everywhere, invisibly, rather than walking the earth like a proper god. Maybe it is. He’ll have to forgive me, for though I am no longer an aħdar qassis gwardjan, I cannot stop being a gwardjan. It is who I am. Who Orholam made me, if Lucidonius spake true.

I draw on the light, and my green
jinnīyah
is there, familiar to me as my dead wives’ faces—my beloved wives, forced into the orgiasts’ flames to expiate the shame and crime of my apostasy.

“I’ve missed you,” Aeshma whispers along my skin, her touch caresses.

I’ve missed her, too. Of course I have. But she knows that.

I expect her to be angry, haughty, to punish me for turning my back on her. But she’s more canny than that. First she’ll get her hooks into me. Later, she’ll punish. Nor does she go to my libido, once so potent, now seemingly dead since my ’Annaiah and Siana burned. Instead, she waits. Perhaps she sees from my face that the only pleasure I seek is the pleasure of battle, of red vengeance. Perhaps even after all this time she feels me directly.

“I would have made you the next Atirat,” she says, mournfully. She puts her hand on my wrist as I start to pour luxin forth from my skin there. “You were to be a god.”

“The daemon’s in your eyes,” Auria says. “Do you see her true, or do you see how she wants you to see?”

I remember when Lucidonius bent the prism toward me as my jinnīyah stood in front of my eyes, shouting blasphemies in my ears. The sudden wash of other colors had shown me what the priests of the other colors saw when they looked at her. In every other color, Aeshma was a horror. No wonder the other
qassisin kuluri
warred with us, called us daemon-worshippers. And then Lucidonius had flipped a mirror out, and in that full-spectrum light, I’d seen that even the green was a thin mask.

Aeshma was no beauty. She was all disease and ugliness.