The Broken Eye (82 page)

She threw the door open and, glowering storms at everyone who crossed her path, made her way to the lift. It stopped down a few floors. Payam Navid, one of the most handsome young men in the Chromeria if not the entire world, stepped on. He looked at the sour look on her face. He was so beautiful it was probably the first time in his life he’d seen a woman frown at him. Probably wasn’t even aware that women
could
frown. Bastard. It wasn’t fair that someone could be so attractive.

He said, “I don’t—”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“I only—”

“Don’t.”

“Come now,” he said, smiling, showing perfect teeth to go with his tall, dark, and gorgeous.

Teia sniffed and waved a hand at his face. “All this pretty you’ve got going on here? One more word, and you lose it.”

For a moment, he seemed amused. She didn’t even come up to his shoulder. She must seem like a puppy barking at him. But then his eyes lit on the embroidery of her Blackguard rank on shoulder, stitched gray on gray. A wash of expressions poured through his perfect face, and then he looked away, intimidated.

He got off at the next floor. Once he was out of harm’s way, he turned and said, “What’s your name, anyway?”

She rolled her eyes, and put her hand to the lever.

He blurted, “Would you like to go to the—”

But she was already gone.

The little draught of confidence she got from that gave her enough strength to step off the lift in the basement. But then she stopped.

Oh, come on, T. Don’t be ridiculous!

One at a time, she lifted her feet and walked to the door of their exercise room. And again, she paused in front of the door. Move!

She threw the door open. It slammed back against the wall, far harder than she’d intended. She stepped into the room, apologetic—not at all the attitude she’d intended.

But then she saw Kip. He was lying on the floor, unmoving, unconscious.

What had he done?!

She ran to him. There was a halo of cards—Nine Kings cards?—around Kip. The heavy bag lay on the floor nearby, torn open, sawdust scattered. Kip’s eyes were open, unseeing. He wasn’t breathing.

No no no!

He was bare-chested, his skin cold, clammy. She rolled him onto his back, and for a moment, she had hope.

In his open eyes, colors were swirling: in Kip, every color of luxin was alive.

But Kip wasn’t.

There was no reaction in those eyes, just a palette of colors swirling down an eternal drain, disappearing, disappearing.

“Kip! Wake up! Kip, come back! Breaker!”

She shook him, but there was no response.

The cards were stuck to him like leeches, holding on. She began tearing them off his skin. They were poison. They were killing him. As each popped off, she saw a swirl of colors fade into his skin like dribbles of ink dropped into a glass of water. What was going on?

Tearing the last one off, she held her breath. But Kip didn’t stir. If anything, the colors rising and falling like billowing clouds in his eyes began to recede.

She had taken his hand in hers. She squeezed it hard. “No, Kip, no.”

But he was dead.

Chapter 75

Being dead wasn’t what Kip expected. He was still himself, so he wasn’t in a card, of that much he was certain. He’d triggered a trap Janus Borig had left on the cards, then. She’d certainly loved her lethal-and-easily-tripped-by-her-friends traps.

It was dark in here. Dark as a tomb—dark as if his eyes were closed. Which they were. Little Kipling, not the brightest color in the spectrum. He was lying facing down on a polished hardwood floor. He stood up—that was good. Good that he could move, right?—and found that he was in a library.

No, maybe not a library, more like
the
Library. Shelves of a curious, luminous red wood marched in lines to the horizon. Leagues of shelves, each five or six times the height of a man. Kip’s eyes traced the lines of a nearby shelf loaded with the new
pressed
books up, and up. There were ladders on rollers to reach the higher shelves, but there was no ceiling. The night sky itself gleamed high above, undistorted, stars unwinking, clearer than Kip had ever seen them.

Kip was no astrologer, but he didn’t see a single constellation that he recognized. A sudden sense of vertigo swept him, as if he were going to go flying off the ground and out into that void. He slammed his eyes down to the shelves again.

Atasifusta. That was the wood. The wood that burned forever. Except here, it was merely burnished to such a high sheen that it provided warm ambient light for the whole library. Neat trick. Kip took a step forward and looked down an aisle to see how wide it was.

There was no end.

He stepped back to his spot, as if to find safety.

He took a deep breath. Wait, was that the first breath he’d taken since he’d been here? Did he have to breathe, being dead and all? Oh, he was breathing. Odd that he wasn’t scared. Confused, certainly. Curious, of course. But not a crumb of cowardice.

Maybe one crumb.

Is a crumb the unit of measure for cowardice?

He tried stepping into the aisle again. Ah, it wasn’t endless, it was merely so wide that it seemed so. Somewhere in an oceanic distance he could see something that had to be a wall, and to the other side, the same. Looking so far and being made aware of the expanse inspired vertigo again. Kip turned instead to look at what was near at hand.

A flurry of activity burst forth, the moment of creation appearing to only begin because he was there to observe it, the shelves near at hand filling with an explosion of texts, a blunderbuss blast of thought flew through the aether of every language and collided with the medium of its time: vast double-roll scrolls were unrolling, being filled with text by invisible quills, being illuminated whimsically, then advancing; whole pages of text were unrolled from a press, lined up like soldiers, and sliced apart and stitched to a binding before flying to their place on a shelf; papyrus was pounded flat in layers even as intricate glyphs danced across its surface; clay tablets were smoothed to uniform thickness, tiny punch marks of cuneiform wedges barely filling it before the tablets hardened in sun or kiln; bamboo was pounded flat, cured and stitched, script dropping down each column like rain: a thousand kinds of writing, on skin and on stone and on wood and on paper and on material for which he had no name; left to right, and right to left, and top to bottom, and all at once, and in no discernible order at all. Some of them flew to shelves nearby, but some—like the cuneiform—flew to distant shelves, rows back.

Almost at Kip’s feet, he saw scrawling—on a tabletop that looked like those in the lecture halls at the Chromeria. In a child’s awkward penmanship, written by an invisible hand, letters leapt out:

Majister Gold Thorn is a bitch

She went to the chirurjins with a notty itch

Majister they sed you have the pox

The only cure is lots of

The doggerel was never finished before it was whisked off to a shelf somewhere. Ooo, poor bastard. Kip couldn’t imagine Magister Goldthorn had taken the mockery well.

The old styles of writing that no one used anymore flew far away, and doggerel that had to have been written in the last ten years was nearby. So … What if this place held every word ever written?
Every
word. And every word, as written, was added.

Which meant Kip was standing at the present, facing the past, watching history roll slowly by to the left and right.

He turned around, expecting to be standing at the edge of a precipice or a blank.

But he was wrong. The future rose before him, league after league of shelves, crammed book after book—the scrolls slowly disappearing as the pressed books crowded them out, and were in turn replaced by shining metal or crystal pieces Kip couldn’t begin to identify somewhere in the distance. And there, beyond even those, far, far in the distance, but still visible, was the library’s wall.

The future
ended
.

Kip looked off to the sides again, and there, dimly could make out walls. To the past—and nothing. The past might be finite, but it went farther back than he could see, and the past was deeper than the future.

I die and go to a library? Sure, it could be worse, but I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries this year. Quite enough time, really. Do I have to stay forever? Where do I go pee?

I suppose the dead don’t pee.

In the same way they don’t breathe?

He was just about to start walking to explore the shelves when a man fell out of the sky. He landed with a sound like a rockslide, right in front of Kip. Somehow, his landing gave the impression that he’d been falling forever, and that the landing wasn’t even a strain on his knees. Sort of like Cruxer landing a jump. Even if Kip had lived to train in the Blackguard for a hundred years, he was pretty certain making a landing look light and easy was a skill he never would have mastered.

The man stood gracefully, fixed the cuffs of a shirt under a three-buttoned black jacket of a cut and shiny fabric Kip had never seen. Over the jacket, he wore a leather greatcoat, black on the outside, white on the inside, slim cut and hanging down to his pointed-toe leather boots. He took off a brimmed hat similar to a petasos and shook back a cascade of platinum-white hair that didn’t quite touch his collar. His features were paler than anyone Kip had ever seen, exotic, unearthly, perfect. He smiled, a genuine smile that touched his mirrored iridescent eyes, and his teeth were not quite white, but instead pearlescent, and the bit of dogtooth that Kip saw in that smile seemed longer and sharper than usual.

This man was not, Kip decided, a
man
. A shiver of fear ran down his spine, despite the man’s apparent friendliness and beauty, but then Kip thought, I’m already dead. What’s he gonna do to me?

Good thing fear is rational. Good thing you can talk yourself right out of it.

“Hail, Godslayer,” the stranger said. With his pretty face and sharp beard and immaculate coiffure, Kip had expected a tenor, but instead the voice emanating from this being was a bass—crisp, perfectly enunciated, not gravelly or an indistinct rumble, but a bass that sounded too big to be coming from this man-sized creature.

“Hail, scary guy who fell out of the sky.”

The stranger’s eye twitched as if with irritation. He smiled to cover it instantly, but not before a ragged crack shot from the corner of his eye where he’d twitched to his ear. It filled in as fast as it appeared, and left the smile alone on his face. “Hail, Godslayer,” he said again, as if being very patient.

“Hail … sir.” Puzzled. It was as if Kip was playing a game, and no one had told him the stakes, let alone the rules. It had happened enough in the last year that Kip should have been getting used to it. But this wasn’t the kind of thing you get used to. The man filled Kip with a quiet, nameless dread.

Already dead, can’t do anything to me. Oh, look at that. There may not be peeing in the afterlife, but it turns out that the strong desire
to pee
is indeed possible.

Which, in itself, was kind of terrifying.

Not moving from the spot where he’d landed, the man extended an open hand, tilted up. It wasn’t quite the attitude for a handshake or a wrist clasp, and Kip looked at it warily. Falling from the silent sky, something slapped into the man’s open hand. A polished black wood cane.

“You’ll excuse me the use of a cane, I hope,” the man said with a sound like great gears grinding. He stepped forward, and Kip could see that the man’s ankles were broken, poorly mended. Perhaps that was the reason for the stiff leather boots. “Under what name have you come here?”

Kip looked to the left and right. “Uh, is this a trick question?”

The man settled into place perhaps ten feet away from Kip, an odd distance for interlocutors. He put his cane centered before him and leaned on it with both hands like a three-legged stool. He waited.

“I am whatever I am. I mean, I am what I ever am. Kip. Kip,” Kip said. “Is there a privy here?”

“Kip? Kip. Not your birth name, is it? Kip, so puny, so insignificant. Barely worth three little letters. ‘Don’t look at me,’ it screams. ‘I’m just a bastard.’ Kip Delauria. Kip Guile. Lard Guile. Breaker. Godslayer. Perhaps Diakoptês? If you’re going to start collecting names in other languages and religions, this is really going to get tedious. But what are you under the names? Under your cloak of names, who are you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I was known as a bit of a wearer of masks myself, you know. They called me … well, why ruin it? It became one of the first Black Cards, forbidden, for those who viewed it lost their minds. That, little Guile, from the tiny fraction of my power that can fit inside a card. You’re dying, right now. Oh, no worries, time is different here. We have all the time out of the world to talk, but your body is dying. I can save you.”

“Well, that solves that,” Kip said. “Here I didn’t know if you were a hero or a villain. Villain.”

“Really? It’s so easy for you?” the immortal asked.

“Not complicated,” Kip said. A million million books, and not one place to pee. “There’s a time for ratiocination, and a time for gut feelings. Gut wins, this time.” Ratiocination? Where did I even hear that word? Too much time in the restricted library.

“And if head and heart are equal, with which facility do you decide whether to follow the one or the other?” The creature smiled. He leaned on the cane with his left hand and propped his right hand on his hip. The move pushed back his long leather coat and revealed a pistol hanging in a special holster made for it at his right hip. It was actually kind of brilliant. Most people carried a pistol either in a bag or in a pocket. This design would make it far easier to draw quickly. It even had a tie at the bottom to keep the holster tight against the leg, so it wouldn’t flop around. Its wearer could always be certain of the position of his pistol. Kip would have to remember that.