“Well, that makes sense with those with old translations, but that’s not applicable to all of them. If there was a single time period where someone erased lots of documents all at once—”
“Like the Office of Doctrine? When the Chromeria anointed luxors?”
Quentin bobbed his head, chagrined. “They must have figured out some mixtures of luxins that would bond with ink and lift it out. When combating heresy, it’s the kind of thing they would have loved to find. And use.”
“Those assholes,” Kip said. “Long dead and still causing problems.” If Teia had been alive during that time, the luxors would have burned her on Orholam’s Glare as a heretic.
“Anyway, here’s the prophecies I’ve got, and then I want to tell you one more thing.”
Kip read:
Death in hand, his card, his lot
He fights/struggles with/kills forethought
“He fights/struggles with/kills?” Kip asked.
“That was my translation. Sorry. It was a tough one. It could mean he’s impulsive? Maybe he kills without thinking ahead?”
“Are they all this bad?” Kip asked.
He could tell the words wounded Quentin. “Some of these languages are highly contextual, and the pertinent portions have been deliberately erased. Someone did this exactly so it would be impossible to reconstruct.”
In the dusk of times the jinn will rise
Rivers flow blood and moon shine blue
Of Two Hundred will come the Nine
To bring about the end of time.
Kip looked up at Quentin. “That doesn’t sound so good. Jinn?”
“Spirits? Powerful ones, though. Demigods?”
“And you’re sure it’s a Lightbringer prophecy?”
“Yes. It’s not choruses or lions frolicking with lambs kind of stuff.”
The rebels rise, the old ways lost,
Heresy, hypocrisy—
“That’s the whole fragment? Not helpful,” Kip said.
Back to the spinner’s wheel
Rejected in blood
Victim of the Promethean’s brood
“Promethean’s”? Kip asked. It sounded like Old Ruthgari.
“Usually it’s a personification of someone who takes violent action intended for some good. Kind of dark overtones to it? But you still haven’t seen the best one yet.”
Kip looked. The last one was only a title. On the Gift of Light. “Um, that’s great, Quentin. Where’s the poem?”
“No, that’s, that’s it. But look!” He pulled out the two books side by side. “The translation is wrong, so it wasn’t erased. They missed it. The ablative with this phrasing usually would mean ‘on the gift of light,’ but it could also mean ‘on the giver of light.’ ”
“You keep looking at me like I’m supposed to have a revelation,” Kip said.
“In the original, the common way to construct it would be ‘doniae luxi.’ But the word order doesn’t matter in an inflected language except for emphasis, but here it’s ‘luxi doniae.’ ”
“Still not—”
“Centuries ago the Parian accent gave way to the Ruthgari, and ‘luxi’ started to be transcribed as ‘luci’.”
“Still…”
“Luci doniae. Which in the nominative case is… C’mon. This is like having to explain the punch line of a dirty joke.”
“Oh! Lucidonius! So a poem ‘On Lucidonius’? But what does that mean?”
Quentin deflated. “Well, I don’t know. But it does mean the Lightbringer is tied to Lucidonius somehow. The Light Giver and the Light Bringer? What if they’re the same? What if the Lightbringer has already come?”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Everyone noticed Lucidonius. He changed—he changed the whole world.”
“But they didn’t notice that he was the same person they’d prophesied about?”
His hands are forged to take the blade,
His skin is dyed for war.
By father’s father is he unmade
He all will save through what all abhor.
Kip was almost done even trying. But Quentin said, “No, no, look, this is not even close to an exact translation—you think it rhymes in our language by coincidence? Even the meter is wrong. Iambs are natural for our tongue, but they wrote in dactylic hexameter.”
“Dact—what?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How does this help us?”
“Well, well, well, it probably doesn’t. But I could spend years with this stuff! And this one, it makes reference to ‘he,’ which I assume is the Lightbringer, at least it’s been erased, too. This last one is a contested prophecy, but I don’t know whether it’s because they aren’t sure if it’s about the Lightbringer, or if it was contested later because it’s impossible.”
… he’ll pluck the immortal’s own beard and steal the shade from his head in the Great Library.
Quentin shrugged. “The plucking of beard hair is an idiom for vexing him, and to steal the shade from a man’s head—to a desert people? Not appreciated. So irritate and infuriate? Why the repetition? I don’t know. Checking the dates on both of those idioms to see when they were in use in the pertinent cultures might shed some light, but it’s a rejected prophecy anyway, so that’ll be low on my list.”
Kip said, “But why contest that one? It seems specific and clear.”
“It is. Unfortunately, we know that Lucidonius never went near the Great Library, and it’s been ash for nigh unto three hundred years now. Tellari separatists burned it down. Gave their lives, merely to take away something we loved and that made us better. May Orholam curse them.”
“That’s all very interesting, and not very helpful.”
“I know, and I haven’t told you the other thing, which is more of both.” Quentin looked suddenly so drained with his excitement past that Kip put a hand on his arm to steady him. Then he took his hand away at Quentin’s frown.
“And what’s that?” Kip asked.
“There’s some great stuff in these libraries. I mean I found out why the Feast of Light and Darkness can be a month off the actual date of the autumnal equinox, like it was this past year. It’s—never mind. Doesn’t matter. There’s also some really terrible stuff in these libraries. More terrible than good, I think. Even focusing narrowly, I’ve come across… Doesn’t matter. None of that other horrible stuff has been erased. So far as I can tell none of the other stuff that I would have expected the luxors to object to has been erased—except everything about the Black Cards. Even their names. They’re just gone, Kip. Nothing else has been erased: just some parts of the Lightbringer prophecies and everything about the black cards. There’s some connection. Some force that doesn’t want us to see the truth here. But it’s all gone. Down to even the impressions a pen would have pressed into parchment. They wanted to keep a secret, and they have. They’ve already won.”
Chapter 58
“What are you doing down here?” Karris asked. She was standing in the doorway of the Prism’s exercise room.
As the winter months had passed, Kip and Karris had fallen into a comfortable rhythm. They spent most of the morning together every day, six days a week, then each went off to their other duties.
“Putting in a bit of time on the bag.” He shrugged.
When he’d first started training with Karris, Kip hadn’t known her well enough to pick out her moods, so over the months, he’d only seen after the fact that she was slowly taking off the shuttered lenses of depression. When she was down, she was more serious, adult, focused. She had that mask on now, her hair dyed raven’s black, pulled back.
“He’s coming back,” Kip said. He turned away from the heavy bag and let his green luxin gloves dissolve. Six months had passed since Ru, almost six months of training and fighting and watching only full Blackguards go out on the skimmers to look for Gavin or the bane. Almost six months of bad news from the war: the loss at Ruic Head, the raids in northern Atash, the cataclysm at Ox Fo
rd, the pyrrhic victory at Two Mills Junction, the steady reading of the Lists, the rolls now full of names of those who’d died from camp diseases, infections, dysentery.
Almost six months hitting this damn bag, hoping to convince that one torn seam to give way and rip open, and it had barely loosened. It was a youthful fantasy to beat the sawdust out of a heavy bag, he knew. He knew it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to do it.
“So you always say.” Karris disappeared behind a screen set up off to one side, and reappeared, wearing the equivalent of Blackguard garb. Red today.
The White was snipping away all Karris’s ties to the Blackguard. The red garb had been an early imposition. Then she’d forbidden Karris to train in the Blackguard’s area in the great yard below the Chromeria. Forbade her to draft. Sent her on little errands. And if it seemed some days like Karris had been crying before she came to train Kip, she never missed a day, and Kip knew that she’d come to look forward to their training. It was one last little slice of her old life, mixed with a new purpose.
“I’m right,” he said. “Last time I was worrying about when Gavin would show up and save the day, I turned around and he was standing right there. Scared a stain right into my pants.”
“Kip! Ew!”
“I was wondering,” Kip said to distract her. “Why do you always call me Kip?”
“Because I’m not a Blackguard anymore?” she asked. She did this sometimes, making him dig deeper.
“It’s not that. Some of the others use Breaker for me, too.”
“Breaker’s your warrior name.”
“You teach me how to fight as much as anyone. Even my book learning with you is focused on fighting strategy and histories of battles.”
Karris went to a weapons bucket, carefully freeing a long, narrow, flexible staff with crescent-shaped blades on each end. She balanced it across her shoulder and stooped, digging through another barrel of nubs and guards. She found what she was looking for and fastened a hard wooden guard with a sponge projecting on each end. Pensive, she said, “We put on a face when we go into battle. You can forget Kip for a time and become Breaker when musket balls are whistling past your ears and your throat burns with the black smoke, and the luxin rage and battle rage join in you. But you’re still Kip. Inside, somewhere, even in that moment, you’re still you. Some warriors want to throw away the other man trembling within them and become only a warrior. It can be done for a time.
“But the other man always comes back, and if he’s been shut in a closet somewhere, unable to grow and learn and come to accept what the warrior does and what the warrior loves, then both of them will be cripples in peace and in war. If you despise your own frailty, rather than come to peace with it, you’ll not only hate yourself, you’ll hate everyone who’s frail. A good commander knows the strength of his men and pushes them to the edge of it, but not over. A good man knows his own strength and does the same.” She smiled. “Of course, at your age, you like to think your limits are both a lot greater and a lot narrower than they actually are.”
“And at yours, you like to think the converse?” Kip said. He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but it seemed witty.
Instead, Karris’s mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed, and her voice went chilly. “You’re calling me old?”
Kip gaped. “I—I…”
She grinned.
“Ah hell. Got me again.”
“Watch your mouth, young man, or I’ll wash it out with soap.”
“That was only my second!” Kip complained. She said he could say hell twice a day, no more. Blackguards guard their tongues, and all that.
“I distinctly counted three,” Karris said.
Kip glowered. Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said sternly. “And quit it.”
Hell, hell, hell. Kip smiled.
“I heard that, too. You always smile when you’re being secretly defiant.”
I do? I do not!
“Yes, you do,” she said.
“Now you’re just guessing,” Kip said.
She shrugged. “If that makes you feel better…”
He grinned, but then got pensive. They were both skipping a ceremony. “So… this Feast of Waxing Light. What are they doing? I mean, without Gavin, what is there to do?”
It had been almost six months since the autumnal equinox that had seen a sea demon and a whale do battle for the Chromeria, or for the Cerulean Sea. Six months of war grinding its gears slowly through the winter, shipping made difficult with heavy seas and torrential downpours, and ships lost and caravans delayed and stalling actions as the Color Prince pushed into Blood Forest. But the dry season was here, and all the satrapies knew that meant more war.
“First there’s a procession in honor of your grandfather, the promachos. Some fireworks. Some martial demonstrations. Given that there’s a war to spend money on, it will be a much-diminished thing.”
“What isn’t, these days?” Kip asked.
She shook her head. “Was I a know-it-all like you when I was young? Don’t answer that.”
“Do I have to go?” Kip asked.
“You don’t want to? Even diminished, it will be a bigger party than you’ve ever seen.”
“I’d rather learn things that might save my life than eat cakes and candies.”
She gave him a dubious look.
“Depends on the cake.”
“Chocolate?”
“That would be worth dying for,” Kip said.
“Can’t get chocolate worth the name since we lost northern Atash,” she said.
“Thus me, here.”
Karris grinned. “Today, I’ll show you the sharana ru, the tygre striper.” She hefted the flexible spear in her hands, and spun it easily. “The sharana ru is said to be carved from sea demon bone. It doesn’t work the way other materials work. Note.” She spun the flexible shaft, and stopped it with an arm. The shaft bent around it like jelly, more flexible than a green branch. It sprang back suddenly.
“Excellent,” Kip said. With his slowly growing knowledge of weapons, he guessed that the sharana ru would be a difficult weapon to master, but would then be terribly effective because it would move with surprising speed when used properly. Still, an odd weapon. How fragile was it to get that springiness? Could it parry a sword?
“You haven’t seen the half of it,” Karris said.
“And what’s the half of it?” Kip asked.
She looked like she’d been about to tell him, until his big mouth said that.
“Let’s let you find out the hard way,” she said.
“Oh, goodie,” he said. He scowled, though he deserved it for acting wise with her.
“Fencing,” she said. “Let’s see that yellow. Five, four…”
Kip drew in a bit of superviolet and then shot it across the room at the control panel. Yellow light bathed the room. He sucked it in hungrily, the rush of clarity giving him the hard edge he would need to draft the perfect yellow he’d practiced so much. He flicked out his hand, and with it, yellow liquid that he furiously worked to solidify and narrow as it streamed from him.
“Three, two…” she counted.
“Too fast, too fast!”
She lofted the sharana ru and began swinging the dual blades in loose circles, swishing the air. She set herself in position just as she reached the end of her smooth count. “One, and—” She lashed out with one end.
Kip brought his yellow luxin sword, trying to finish the temper even as his body went to the correct block instinctively. Excess yellow luxin coating the blade burst into light with the energy of the collision between blunt yellow blade and blunt wooden guard.
He didn’t make it, and instead the yellow luxin burst apart.
But both of them had narrowed their eyes against the blast of light, used to this. A slash cut across Kip’s front shin, a smear of ink from the sponge on the sharana ru’s guard: a bruise for Kip and a point for Karris.
&nbs
p; She let him form the sword correctly. It took more than ten seconds. And they went again. Their bout was fast, ridiculously fast, and finished in less than two seconds.
He cursed inwardly, and settled into his stance again.
Again, a loss. And again, and again, and again. Aptly named, the tygre striper left Kip with streaks—mercifully of ink, rather than blood—across stomach, arms, forehead, shin, and hands.
On the tenth round, he scored a point, just before Karris did. She nodded. In a real fight, they’d both be dead. The Blackguard didn’t want dead Blackguards who’d also killed their opponents; they wanted unscratched Blackguards who’d killed their opponents. Still, from the humble acorn…
Again, a loss. And again, and again, and again. But Kip was starting to figure out how the sharana ru worked, how it sprang back when Karris would snap one side against her own leg as she attempted a short sweep—a feint—at Kip’s face to set up the speedier long sweep. The flexibility itself gave a small measure of predictability, for what bent must become straight.
Even with the guard and the sponge, Karris’s weapon hurt. Every time they sparred, Kip’s body was covered with bruises for days. His favorite was when she used a rapier and his bruises looked like freckles. Bruise-freckles on the turtle-bear. Not that Karris cared if he complained about it. And her fighting—learned the hard way with Blackguards—wasn’t the speedy, light dance the court duelists used. It was full-contact, brutal action. Hip throws and leverage, forearm strikes and elbows and grabbing your opponent’s blade with a gloved hand—or grabbing your own and pressing it to his neck. Kicks and throws and foot sweeps and clothing pulls and eye gouging and knee strikes to the kidneys—everything, everything dirty and fast and effective and lethal.
Kip’s weight and burgeoning strength should have been a significant advantage. Maybe it would have, if they’d been wielding battle axes or war hammers. Karris was fast and a small target, and she was an expert at using leverage to compensate for what she lacked in strength compared to her beefier Blackguard brothers. Sixteen years of constant practice against the best opponents in the world had made her surprisingly deadly for her diminutive figure.