Kip took a drink. He barely noticed the burning. “And you think that’s an acceptable way for families to act?”
“Acceptable? One doesn’t reason with lions. One doesn’t accept reality. One adapts to it.”
“But you aren’t like my father, you didn’t adapt to a situation where your brother was betraying you. You were the betrayer.” The words had sounded so logical, so reasonable in Kip’s head before he said them. But as they came out the blunderbuss that was his mouth, they expanded into a razor cloud.
Andross Guile’s expression froze, his knuckles whitened on his brandy glass, showing the hit. It was with visible effort that he contained his rage. He hadn’t become the Red—of all his colors—by accident. “How is it to be you, Kip? Cocooned in layers of protective ignorance thicker than your blubber, a blundering whale with sperm for your brains and unintentional ruins all around? Abel thanked me for saving this family. He thanked me for saving him from a burden he was ill fit to bear, and a string of failures that drove him to self-destruction.”
“So he forgave you. That tells me something about him. What does it tell me about you? Except perhaps—”
“Insolent boy!”
“—that you would destroy a good man who swam seas you wished to call your own? That you are a sea demon, mindless in your territorial rage, destroying your enemies, true, but also driving away even—”
Stop, Kip! Stop before—
“—your own family. Even finally your own wife.”
Oh. Shit.
Andross’s eyes glittered, and Kip’s training took over. His eyes darted back and forth from the whites of Andross’s eyes to his hips: the first places he would be able to detect danger, whether magical or mundane. Then out to his hands, one of which held the crystal brandy glass, which could be flicked toward Kip as a distraction, the other of which could be used to signal Grinwoody.
“Took you long enough,” Andross said. “Finally reached the bottom of your rhetorical toolbox, have we?”
“Huh?” Kip asked. His sense of impending doom hadn’t relaxed one whit, but Andross didn’t look dangerous. Everything Kip’s gut was telling him was contradicted by what Andross’s eyes were saying.
“Bringing up my departed wife. Such an obvious target that I wondered if you were either stupider than I’d imagined, or more self-controlled—and therefore more dangerous—than I’d believed. Turns out I was right about you after all.”
“Did you even—”
Andross raised a finger, and Kip shut up. He hated himself for it a moment later, but his brain must have realized that raised finger was a lifeline, and, for once, had taken control from his tongue.
“Something you should realize,” Andross said. “Merely because a target’s obvious, and an initial line of defenses stands in place, that doesn’t mean the target isn’t still there, and still soft as an egg in its shell. You understand this, Lard Guile. Your disgusting obesity can withstand one insult, at least to the public eye, but even the slightest brush causes your secret self-contempt and shame to grow. So you’ve found my obvious weak spot. Congratulations for having eyes. Just know this: Grinwoody, if he says one more word about Felia, blow his brains out.”
Kip heard the click-clack of a hammer at his left ear. “With pleasure, my lord,” Grinwoody said.
Slowly, so as not to be thought to be attacking, Kip glanced at the pistol, and the man. Grinwoody was indeed pleased, and the pistol barrel looked huge. Too close to Kip’s eyeball for him to see how good the quality of it was, how likely to misfire. But then, this was Andross Guile’s pistol. It would be the best. Kip was getting faster at drafting, at moving, but he wasn’t this fast. Not yet.
“You wouldn’t,” Kip said. Stupid thing to say. Grinwoody was even standing off to the side so that the gore—and possibly the bullet—wouldn’t fly from Kip onto Andross.
“If you think I’m bluffing,” Andross said, leaning forward to pour himself more brandy, “say her name.”
The moment stretched between them like a lazy cat. Kip knew already that he was going to fold. Andross knew it, too.
“Well, that was a great talk, grandfather.” A little needle to drive home the past loss on that count. “Are we done here?”
Shouldn’t have asked permission. Kip stood. Should have stood first.
“The thing that astounds me, grandson,” Andross said, embracing the loss, showing it didn’t hurt him as much as Kip hoped. Probably deceitfully, but still. Damn. “—is that it must be equally obvious to both of us that I am your only hope. Our family’s enemies will try to destroy you, and our family’s friends won’t try to save you, because they know I despise you. To say nothing of what I may do to you myself. Yet you choose this path. Still. Your father’s gone, surely dead by now. The facts have changed, but you haven’t. Held too long, stubbornness is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
“And would you respect me if I’d come in here and licked your boots?” Kip asked.
Andross Guile looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language. “Respect? Kip, I’ve destroyed many men I respected. If you wish to add yourself to that list, you’re close to earning the destruction, if not the respect.”
“Please,” Kip said, “underestimate me. It will only make this sweeter.”
Andross grinned wryly, genuinely amused, and it was disconcerting to see that grin. It was all Gavin Guile, and the sense of bereavement Kip felt at seeing that winsome grin on this monster’s face threw him off balance. “If your strategy rests on being underestimated, might not be best to announce such, you think?” Andross asked.
Kip could only find inchoate curses on his once-nimble tongue. He said nothing.
“Enough,” Andross said. He stood and shepherded Kip to the door. He lowered his voice. “Now. The matter I summoned you for.”
Orholam’s knobby knee to my testicles—all this, and we still haven’t talked about what he summoned me for?
“The cards,” Andross said quietly as they reached the door. “I don’t know where you’ve hidden them, but I want them. If you give them to me, you will be my heir. I will take you under my wing and teach you all I know, and I will tell you secrets you cannot conceive.”
The cards? Again? “If I found them, once I gave them to you, you’d just kill me,” Kip said.
“Voice down,” Andross said. He stroked his chin, thinking. “Surely Janus Borig told you how they work. I can draft four colors. But one of the colors I lack is blue. I can feel, taste, and sense what happens inside the cards, but I can’t see anything. In order to use the cards to their fullest, I need a full-spectrum polychrome. The other polychromes are… unacceptable for various reasons. I need you, and I would have a continuing need for you. And you would need me to teach you how to translate knowledge into power after I’m gone. If anything, you would be the partner in the superior position.”
Kip blinked. It made too much sense. “If I did this,” he said, “I’d keep the cards in my possession. Otherwise, if you tired of me, you could simply find someone who drafts the colors you lack and put together the pictures for yourself, albeit more slowly than I could do it for you.”
“Done,” Andross said. “With one caveat: my card, my sons’ cards, and my wife’s are mine. If you even look at them before you hand them over, this deal is moot. Think on it. I’ll give you until your half brother arrives or until Sun Day, whichever comes first. Understand, though, if you try to hand over the cards to someone else, I’ll have no choice but to kill you. Your time is running out. Grinwoody?”
The slave made a small, unobtrusive sound to signal his presence.
Kip looked from one to the other. Why were they all still whispering? Why were they standing right at the door to the promachos’s room?
“How much did she overhear?”
Grinwoody shot a glance at Kip, as if wondering that Andross wished Kip to hear this, then said, “Most everything you said at the couch. She awakened almost immediately, and moved to eavesdro
p soon after. She won’t have been able to hear any of this.”
“Well, then, Kip, your move,” Andross said. “Unless I miss my guess, she’ll try to exploit the schism in our family, and being the green that she is, she’ll be impulsive enough to think she needs to act immediately, so she won’t wait for instructions from her much more formidable sister Eirene. I would imagine Tisis will come to speak to you in tears at some point this week, playing the damsel in distress. That tends to work well on men who wish they were strong. Don’t thank me, she’s too young for my tastes, and as you surmised, not good at feigning pleasure. It’s a skill most women pick up early, so I’m not sure if she’s stupid or stubborn. Quite the hotblood, though, according to her best friend. Eager for the bed, though she’s kept her suitors short of the jade gate itself.”
“Jade gate?”
“Her quim. It’s her family’s horse trader roots showing through. They’ve been nobles a bare century. Knowing how some value such things, she’s intended to sell her virginity dearly, even if it’s virginity only by the most technical of definitions. Her friend, being her friend, swore up and down that her chastity, such as it is, wasn’t merely for bargaining purposes, though. She claimed Tisis has always had romantical notions about her first time being special. Hmmph, youth. I imagine she’ll be too smart to lead her efforts on you with seduction, but as long as you play your cards right, she’ll flop on her back in no time. She did for me. Not sure how you’ll fit into the special first-time. But she’ll remember it forever, and surely that is one definition of special, is it not?”
“Do you poison every well you drink from?” Kip asked. The sheer meanness of the man baffled him.
“I just told you, I didn’t drink from that well. I left it for you, on purpose, in case you were delicate about sharing with a better man. You throw my kindness in my face. Perhaps you are thick in more than the obvious sense. We’ve spoken too long. Begone.”
Kip kept his curses and his questions to himself, and obeyed his grandfather’s order, just like any other soldier in the promachos’s army. The Blackguards outside the door said nothing, but then, that was what they were supposed to do, wasn’t it?
Four puzzled slaves were waiting for him at his room. “My lord,” one said, “there was a crime reported?”
Kip stepped past them into the room. Everything was pristine. The desk had been replaced. The feather bed had been replaced. Every surface was gleaming with polish. Even his purse was back in its hiding spot. Kip dismissed the slaves with an apology. They looked at him like he was crazy.
And who’s to say they’re wrong? What am I doing?
I’m being used in fights I know nothing about, and I’m taking sides based purely on the personal charisma of the players, not on what’s wrong or right, or where I should be, or even what’s most advantageous. I’ve been acting like a child.
Andross knew exactly what I was going to do when he trashed my room. I’m that predictable.
He felt suddenly sick to his stomach.
In Nine Kings, I’d be the Blunderbuss—good only for short ranges, and easily picked up by any enemy and pointed wherever he wished.
What am I going to do?
Chapter 62
~Shimmercloak~
The perspective isn’t right. It’s hovering around waist height, swinging back and forth. It’s a hand, swinging as a young woman walks. She has something cupped in her hand so that it will be concealed from anyone in front of her, but it’s longer than her hand, and this perspective is perfect to see as much of the weapon as possible.
This card isn’t a person; it’s a thing, and the perspective is what the artist had chosen to show.
A short, jagged blade, obsidian edges with an ivory core. Not so much shaped like a knife as like a shark’s tooth, a broad triangle with a winking diamond in the center.
The bouncing accelerates as the young woman begins jogging.
Before I can see much more, the perspective swings violently as the blade slams into a woman’s side, is pulled out, bloody, and then poised at her throat.
With the blade at her throat, now I can see her face. Her irises are stained red, halfway to the halo, and wide with fear and pain. The attacker’s arm is threaded through hers, and the drafter is turned toward a red-painted wall.
The drafter regains her wits; she drafts, soaking up red light, the whites of her eyes filling as with smoke—but this is what the assassin is waiting for. The obsidian edge is rammed into the side of her throat, and suddenly, that black shiny stone is somehow alive. Blood gushes out, and I can’t see if the red that blankets the ivory is from the blood spilling from her neck, or if it glows with an internal light.
I see the drafter’s eyes bleach, not only the natural recession of red from the whites as a drafter finishes drafting, but deeper. As if something is sucking the life’s blood from her. Her sclera go pure white, and then the impossible happens. Her crimson-stained irises—red halfway to the halo—dim and then disappear. As the light of life goes out of her eyes, her eyes are left their natural brown.
I’ve seen dead drafters. Even as a warrior’s scars don’t disappear in death, so a drafter’s scars stay with her: her eyes don’t bleach.
The assassin is already moving, carefully dragging the drafter into an alcove, piling rubbish on her body, using her cloak to clean hands and blade. She tucks the blade away, and my perspective is lost in darkness.
In darkness I stay for long and long, jarred and jostled. Is she running? I lose all track of time. I may be here forever.
The blade comes out in a room lit with lanterns, is handed over to a bent-backed old woman. She washes it in a basin. But the blood doesn’t wash from the diamond. It was a diamond, wasn’t it?
Now, despite washing, it’s a ruby.
No, not a plain ruby. The colors undulate, swirling, pulse like the beating of a heart. The old woman chuckles, delighted. She holds up the living stone to a magnifying lens, studies it minutely.
She moves to a work table, puts the ruby in a delicate vise. In a few minutes, she’s bored a tiny, shallow hole into the gem. Satisfied, she prepares the rest of the room. She pushes everything else off her work table and carefully drapes a long muddy-brown cloak across it. She pulls forward a choker concealed in the collar. Multicolored chains connect choker to cloth. With deft hands, she cracks open the choker, exposing the knotted chains themselves.
Adjusting the chains so they sit just so on the bench, she pulls a stool over, and puts on clear, magnifying spectacles. She draws the ruby forth again, and takes the chimney off her lantern. She screws a tiny post of ivory and obsidian shard into the ruby, and blows out the lantern.
The sound of chains and gears, and then a crack of light. The ceiling splits open and full-spectrum sunshine pours in, bounces off mirrors, and is focused directly on the old woman’s hands. She holds the ruby full in the light with the post down, like one would hold a pen.
The post—her nib—goes red, and she begins dabbing living red ink onto the exposed wires where the cloak’s collar connects. The post writhes with luxin, and the collar chains devour it. The cloak’s own color changes, becoming a redder brown in streaks as she moves from chain to chain. She reaches the end finally, and as she stops, I see that the ruby is now as drained of color as the murdered drafter was.
Clicking her tongue, the old woman examines her work. She sets aside the diamond, runs her hand over the cloth, and finally snaps shut the choker over its chains.
“My part is finished,” she says. “But to make this cloak a shimmercloak, you need to find yourself a Prism willing to give you his life and Will.” She barks a laugh. “Unless you’ve got some other splitter of light at hand?”
Chapter 63
Teia was walking through the evening crowds to clear her head after the afternoon Blackguard practice. Kip had skipped again. That was happening more and more often. Despite that, he wasn’t falling behind. Between his private training sessions with Karris Guile and
sparring with the squad under Tremblefist’s personal instruction—and they’d all taken Kip under their wings, giving him pointers at every opportunity—Kip was actually worth his spot on Squad Aleph now. And not just for his mind.
Fine, primarily for his mind.
People were bumping into Teia. She didn’t have a purse on her belt, so she wasn’t terribly alert, but it was irritating. For all the good that being small did her sometimes, when she moved through a crowd, if she wanted go faster than a crawl, she had to really move, ducking and dodging in a way that had become second nature to her, but doing that didn’t exactly engender the meditative thoughtfulness she was seeking. No one bumped into Commander Ironfist. Not on accident, anyway.
Teia remembered an instance of a young woman stepping into the commander’s path just in time to be bowled over. The commander’s reflexes were quick enough that he’d practically snatched the woman out of the air. She’d purred, melting into his arms. The Blackguards had laughed.