The Broken Eye (44 page)

The crew gathered on deck. Many of them had slept on deck, not trusting that someone wouldn’t come and lock them to an oar once again. In the growing light of the rosy-fingered dawn, they took their places.

Antonius spoke first. “This day, we must decide our destination. We’ve food and water for what? Five days? I’ve heard tales of your rowing prowess, and I’m sure you could reach half the coast of Blood Forest and half the coast again of Ruthgar. But there are only two viable options: go to Big Jasper, or go to Rath.”

“Why would we go to Rath?” someone asked.

“You left out the third option,” someone else said. “We can keep pirating. Sun Day’s coming, all sort of fat fish in the water for us to take.”

“Listen to me!” Antonius said. He was too fearful, too young. He thought he was losing the sailors’ attention. He wasn’t. They simply wanted to taste their freedom a bit. What could make a man feel more like a free man than interrupting his betters without consequence? For men who’d lived under the lash, it was fine wine.

“I’m offering you freedom, and more,” Antonius said. “My cousin, Lady Eirene Malargos, is fair and rich and connected. If you land in the wrong city, you’ll be seen as fugitive slaves, game for anyone to recapture. You land somewhere worse, and you’re mutineers. You could be hanged or ’hauled. My cousin will give you papers, filed in every capital. Freedom. Never having to run again. It goes without saying that we split the cargo. Even shares for everyone. No share for me, though I rescued you. All that, and fifty danars each.”

“We want to keep the ship, too!” someone shouted out.

“The
Bitter Cob
will be sold and the profit divided up with the rest of the shares,” Antonius said. “That’s the only way everyone gets an even split. If some of you want to go in together and buy it, that’s your business.”

Gavin stood up. “Lord Antonius,” he said, inclining his head. “I want you to know how much we all appreciate you and your actions. We’ll make sure you’re amply rewarded. However. I’m not really sure why you’re even trying. We’re going to Big Jasper, because whatever you offer, I’ll double.”

The men cheered.

But Antonius held up his hand silent, waiting. Someone shouted, “Shut yer yaps, ya rabble, let the lord drive the price up!” The men laughed, but eventually quieted.

“Two things,” Antonius said. “One that you know, and one that you can’t. First, you all know Eirene Malargos’s reputation. She is a tough trader, but she always keeps her word, no matter what. Second, in normal times, Gavin Guile could indeed double whatever she and I could offer you. In normal times, I know Gavin Guile would honor his promise to us, though we all know that the Guiles have earned their surname anew a thousand times each generation.”

That was a bit too complicated a construction for the sailors. These were simple men. But Gavin didn’t interrupt. Let the boy play his gambit. Gavin was ascendant once more. This was his game. He wasn’t going to have a crew he’d served with for months be taken out from under him. He wouldn’t allow it. He saw Orholam staring at him, his prophet eyes intent.

“But these are not normal times. As I heard from you all last night, Luxlord Andross Guile stabbed his own son and threw him overboard.” He paused. “I tell you now that the luxlord has not been idle since his son has been gone.”

Men were looking at Gavin, and he felt dread rising in him.

“Andross Guile has been named promachos,” Antonius said. “And he has consolidated power in a way that even Gavin Guile couldn’t do during the False Prism’s War. He doesn’t want the enemy son he thought he murdered to come back. For your own sakes and for Gavin’s, the last place you want to go is Big Jasper.”

It took Gavin’s breath. In that moment, he knew it was true.

And, too late, he realized that they had only Antonius’s word on this. But these sailors, not schooled in oratory, many of them unable even to read, were able to read a face. Gavin’s undisguised dread was a confirmation of everything Antonius said.

“But Gavin is the Prism. That’s gotta count for—”

“Is he?” Antonius said. “I know you believe he is. I believe he is, too. But if he came into Big Jasper and his father’s men seized him, and he shouted, ‘I am the Prism!’ would they not say, ‘Then draft, Prism, save yourself, prove yourself!’? He can’t draft. He can’t prove who he is. Gavin is our friend, and our Prism—aye, I believe it! But now, in wanting to go home, he is like a drunk friend who wants to swim across the sea. It is not a good friend who encourages that drunk to swim. Prove your friendship to Gavin, and your devotion to your Prism—by not letting him throw his life away.”

Gavin had no answer, no counter. His golden tongue was too heavy to make words. He hadn’t thought it through, had been too busy thinking about the wrong things. He’d been outmaneuvered by a boy. He was slipping. He was lost.

“Tell me,” Antonius said, “what happens to the simple sailor who comes between two warring giants? I tell you what doesn’t happen. A simple sailor doesn’t get paid double. He doesn’t get rewarded. He gets killed outright. So tell me, who wants to head to Rath?”

Chapter 40

Kip didn’t know why he was surprised. He’d thought once he got into the restricted libraries his problems would be solved. As if merely because you’d had to fight for something that meant it was good. The truth was harder to find. The books were filled with accounts the luxiats didn’t want read, but finding exactly what Kip needed—when he didn’t know what that was—was far harder.

The forbidden library had become the squad’s second home. When Kip wasn’t training with Karris or attending lectures or training with the Blackguards, he was here. If Andross Guile had been initially irritated that Kip had used his writ to get all of his friends access to the library as well, he’d been placated when Kip reported how the luxiats had been secretly defying the promachos.

Kip was sure there were some very unpleasant discussions between Andross and the High Luxiats after that, but of course he didn’t get to see any of that. He was also glad to see that Andross had blocked any direct vengeance the luxiats might have wanted to take on Quentin. Not that the young scholar took much hope of that. “Light never forgets,” he said.

“Huh?” Kip asked.

“It’s how we say luxiats have long memories,” Quentin said, not even looking up from some boring tome of archaic theology. Quentin mostly filled his time doing his own research, exploiting the access Kip had given him to restricted materials for a treatise he was writing, but he’d also become a vital resource and good friend to the squad.

“Orholam have mercy,” Cruxer said. He’d finished his own studies for the day and had been helping Kip search for books on the black cards. He sat back from the scroll he had unrolled in front of him.

“What?” Ferkudi asked.

All of them were seated around a table. Ferkudi and Daelos—who had only learned to read in the last year and still read slowly—were agonizing over their own studies nearly as much as Ben-hadad, who’d known how to read for years, but still had trouble with the words swimming around the page.

All paused from their work. It had turned out there was a lot of boring material that the Magisterium had banned, but every once in a while they found a gem.

Big Leo said, “You can’t not tell us. I’ve been reading about flowering plants for two hours. Flowering plants, Cruxer. Flowering. Plants.” Kip liked Big Leo a lot. His mother had been an acrobat and his father a strongman for a traveling circus. They’d been killed in the False Prism’s War; Ferkudi had said it was because Leo’s father didn’t know how to fight, despite his enormous strength. Big Leo had vowed to become the best fighter he could, to never be vulnerable. But other than the intensity that sometimes came out when he was drafting red or sub-red, he was good-humored and wry.

Cruxer said, “I sort of had this picture of the greens worship—” He looked around at them, suddenly embarrassed. “Sorry, Teia.”

“Shut up,” she said. “Go on.” The squad treated her like one of the boys most of the time, but neither the squad nor Teia was terribly consistent about when she wanted to
not
be treated like one of the boys.

He shook his head. “It sounds like fun, right? Orgies and wild drunkenness and dancing and, uh, temple girls—”

“It wasn’t only temple
girls
,” Teia said.

They looked at her.

“Don’t even,” she said.

Cruxer cleared his throat. “Uh, anyway. I just came across instructions for the planting ritual. It’s, uh, it’s instructions on how to prepare the infants for human sacrifice. It’s not just how to remove the heart from such a small space, but also how to have musical instruments play loudly at the point when the infant starts wailing as they’re cut open so that the worshippers don’t … don’t lose faith.”

The whole squad went silent for a moment. “Orholam curse them,” Big Leo said.

“I could handle that. I mean, I’d heard they passed babies through the flames, and I…” Cruxer shrugged. “It was just a story. But this … the worst part is it details how to choose the babies by lot, ‘due to the usual problem of there being many more infants offered by parents than the dozen needed.’ This wasn’t some evil priest ripping a babe out of the arms of some young mother. They did it willingly. Our ancestors. Our people. How could they?”

Quentin said, “If I may? There was a warrior-priest once named Darjan who they say saw and participated in all the worst of war: massacres and murders and torture and worse, and excelled at all of it. He was a leading pagan priest, but he became one of Lucidonius’s personal converts, and after a lifetime of war around seven of the nine kingdoms, he put out one of his eyes, moved to Tyrea and lived out his days as an ascetic, climbing daily to the top of—well, a statue or what is now Sundered Rock or—there are arguments, and—not important. He spent the last thirty years of his life praying dawn to dusk, and—more not important stuff. He once said, ‘For most of our lives, that Orholam is just should fill us with fear, but there are moments when that truth is the only thing that can fill us with peace.’”

Kip said, “Are you telling me this is what I’ve been missing out on by skipping the ‘Lives of the Saints’ lectures? Murderous warrior-priests who camped out back in Rekton? I climbed on that statue!”

“Way to miss the point, Breaker,” Teia said.

“You have to sit through a lot of lectures to get the good ones,” Quentin admitted. They all laughed a little, and they all knew it was only to cover over what they’d heard. But they were all ready to let it go.

“It’s sort of a ‘Look inward first, but look outward, too’?” Teia asked Quentin. It was an old saying.

“Pretty much—the real quote was Ambrosius Abraxes, ‘Look ye first to thy innermost parts. Search and know them as does Orholam himself, and then may ye turn thy gaze to the deeds of those who persecute thee.’ Some of the saints had a real way with words, others…” He grinned.

Still serious, Cruxer said, “This is who we’re fighting. This wasn’t an individual’s guilt—one bad priest oppressing a community that feared him. It was the entire community, eager to participate in what they knew was evil.”

“There’s no evidence that the Color Prince’s people have done any of this,” Ben-hadad said uncomfortably.

“This is what they want us to go back to!”

“They probably don’t even know about this,” Ben-hadad said. “It’s here, in this library. How would—”

“Are you on their side?” Cruxer asked. “You read it, you tell me if such things don’t go a long way to explaining why the Chromeria sent luxors out into the world.”

The table fell silent. Of all them, Quentin looked worst. “That was a … dark chapter in the Magisterium’s history. We don’t even like to speak of it.”

Teia said, “I’ve heard rumors that some of the High Luxiats themselves have been agitating to give the Office of Doctrine some of their old powers again.”

Quentin shook his head. “Other luxiats have foolishly said such things, yes, but I don’t think it goes that high.”

“They haven’t squashed those rumors, though,” Kip said.

“They’re scared,” Quentin said. “But they’re wiser than scared. We can trust them.”

“I’m sure people thought that the first time the luxors were established,” Ben-hadad said.

“Quentin’s right, though,” Teia said. “They’re right to be scared. Every time we hear about the war, it’s about a loss like at Ruic Neck. Even the victories don’t make sense. A victory at Sitara’s Wells? And then two weeks later a victory at Amitton? Our armies marched backward as fast as they could to reach the next ‘victory’? I think we’re losing everywhere, and they’re lying about it.”

“Enough about the war,” Cruxer said. “I don’t think we should be looking at these books anymore. These volumes were restricted for good reason. I think this knowledge deserves to be lost.”

“You can’t be serious,” Ben-hadad said.

“Look at what I just read,” Cruxer said. “I can’t unlearn that! I didn’t even read you all of it. It’s worse. And I didn’t even finish. What’s wrong with saying that in some cases, other people know best?”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone to know what’s best for me,” Ben-hadad said.

“Then maybe you don’t belong in the Blackguard,” Cruxer snapped, “because that’s what you agree to every time you take an order.”

“Enough!” Kip said. “Cruxer, I’m sorry you had to read that. If you need to stop, stop. But I need to do this.”

“Do you? You don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

It was a sore spot. They’d looked through a mind-numbing number of genealogies: Klytos Blue was, like most nobles, related to nearly everyone, and though they’d found hints of dozens of scandals, none involved Klytos directly. It was getting harder not to conclude that they’d been wasting their time. Kip shot back, “If you can’t handle the horror of what man can do to man, maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t be in the Blackguard.”

The table fell silent.

Cruxer’s ever-warm eyes chilled. “Breaker, we’re going to be part of this war, like it or not. It’s going to kill some of us at this table. And it’s going to change all of us. It doesn’t mean we should be eager for those changes. Most of them aren’t good.”