It was all different now. He wasn’t sure why, with all the radical changes he’d been through, that somehow this little one struck him.
If I ever lose it all, I could still make a better living than I ever could have imagined back in Rekton, just by drafting bits of yellow luxin to sell.
All the inherited wealth and position were somehow external. But this tiny little thing was somehow his. He would never go back to who he’d been. Couldn’t.
“Four months?” Mistress Phoebe was saying. “Hmm. You have your father’s memory? You as smart as he is?”
“No, and not even close,” Kip said, coming back to the moment, pushing all that self-indulgent nonsense away.
“More modest, at least, not that that’s hard,” Mistress Phoebe said. “Good. It’ll make you work more than he ever did. Us mere mortals work for our bread and board. One hour a day, young Guile.”
“Every other day,” Karris said. “He’s got six other colors to practice, and Blackguard training.”
Kip groaned. Quietly. Karris would let him get away with that much.
“Sad,” Mistress Phoebe said. “I had all sorts of onerous chores I was looking forward to him performing. Looks like it’ll be study only instead.”
And so it had gone, with every color. Kip didn’t know how Karris bullied, blackmailed, or begged, but she got him tutors in every color. She kept him in some of his classes—engineering and a basic history course—but had him skip others. The time for hagiographies would have to be later, she said, if he lived. Without exception, his tutors were excellent. Some of them were the best in their field, like Mistress Phoebe. Others were simply great teachers.
Karris taught him fighting herself, incorporating drafting with the purely mundane fighting that the Blackguard inductees mostly did. She said that once the rest of the nunks did start to incorporate drafting, Kip would either get much better than average or much worse: the others had only one or two types of luxin to figure out how to use in fighting. Kip had seven.
There was too much to learn in a man’s lifetime, she said, and a woman would be weak in body by the time she learned it all. But she’d teach him as much as she could.
And she was a good teacher, despite the handicap of having to teach him drafting while being forbidden to draft herself. She had an uncanny instinct for knowing when he tried to ease up, but she wasn’t cruel.
He could tell that she was figuring out her own new roles, too. When she walked with him from the blue tower workshops into the big practice field where the Blackguards met, he saw a flash of grief in her eyes.
Trainer Fisk saluted her, hand to heart. She moved to salute back, then stopped herself and nodded to him instead, a lady, not a Blackguard.
Kip had a thought before he jogged over to get in line, and blurted it out: “He’s coming back. I swear.”
She didn’t try to deny she’d been thinking about it. “The world isn’t always so merciful, Kip.” She turned and left abruptly, head held high. Something in the rigidity of it told Kip that it was that or collapse.
So unlike his own mother, for whom the least harsh word was an excuse to smoke more haze or drown in a bottle. He wished his mother had been half the woman Karris was.
And that thought led him to Zymun. Orholam’s shit. Kip’s oath, offered so readily, buying what he needed with the coin he didn’t want to keep, was seeming more expensive by the day.
From Andross, who still played him regularly, Kip learned that Karris had disappeared after the war, only coming back to the Chromeria more than a year later.
That hadn’t been uncommon. Families had been destroyed in any of a dozen ways by the war, and many of the old guard hadn’t come back at all after Sundered Rock. Others had been gone for long periods simply trying to repair the damage done to their estates in their respective satrapies, having to hire and train new people to take over from those killed or exiled in the war. The old indolence so many families had been able to afford before the war was simply gone. An absence of a year for the scion of a once-great family had been unremarkable.
Andross said it had taken him a long time to find out what had happened. Karris had stayed with some distant relations in Blood Forest and left the child with them.
She still thought it a secret. But even if Kip were willing to risk Andross’s wrath by breaking his word to him, how do you pull someone’s secret shame out into the light, and then make it worse?
‘That son you thought was secret? Andross knows all about it, and he’s bringing him here. And your son may be more loyal to Andross than anyone. Oh, and he lacks all human decency and emotion except ambition.’ Any way Kip played the conversation, it went downhill fast. And that was before Andross avenged himself.
I’m Kip the Lip, and in this, I’m not able to blurt out the truth.
Andross had looked at him during one of their games and paused. Kip had been plying him for news of the war. The last he’d heard, the Chromeria had lost at Ruic Neck but had won—despite Teia’s scoffing—at Sitara’s Wells and a small town called Amitton. Andross naturally had all the most accurate and timely information available. Andross said, “This is not for sharing, you understand?”
“Of course.”
“We’re losing. We’ll continue to lose for months. The winter storms could sink any ships with reinforcements or matériel we’d send. We’re gathering what we can, and fighting delaying actions, slowing them. It will be after Sun Day before we can bring our full might to bear. We will lose all of Atash, and perhaps a third of Blood Forest, depending.”
“It’s that bad?” Kip asked. Some people were still talking like they expected a quick victory now that the satrapies were united against the threat.
“Worse.” Then Andross had said nothing for a long time.
“What is a man’s oath, Kip?”
He wasn’t looking for an answer.
“What is a man’s oath but his will put into words? If a man puts his words false, and sets will against word, are not both weakened?”
Kip’s skepticism—not about the sentiment, but on the source of it—must have shown, because Andross said, “You will notice, grandson, that though I often misdirect and manipulate—”
“Lie.”
“Yes, lie,” he said as if the difference were a trifle. “But I almost never give an oath. When I do, I uphold it. Utterly. Every people from the moment Orholam gave man the light of reason has known and allowed the petty lies that are as natural as breathing, the words to which no will is attached. And every people has distinguished those from oaths. Vows. The moment of creation itself was a perfect word perfectly wedded to a perfect will.”
“You believe that?” Kip asked. “I thought you were an atheist.”
The instant intensity came back to Andross’s multicolored eyes. “A word I hope you use not of me publicly, idly or otherwise.”
“Never,” Kip said.
He seemed placated. “I have more… nuanced beliefs than most. Orholam is a lawgiver in a distant land. He is king of a thousand worlds. Such is enough for his majesty, and the actions of men are either mostly or entirely beneath his notice, their loves and hatreds, their triumphs and tragedies—”
“But not their lies?” Kip asked, pushing it by interrupting once again.
“Does the stone need to notice when you release it from your hand in order to fall? Orholam is lawgiver. When young lovers fornicate and sire a bastard, they aren’t being punished. It’s a natural consequence of the laws governing the system. Are you as dull as the luxiats that you cannot see the difference between this and atheism?”
“Orholam is a caring lord,” Kip said. Not so much because he believed it, but to see what Andross would say.
“Caring enough to give us rational and consistent laws, which is great care indeed. Laws that apply to the faithful, to apostates, to pagans, and to those in vast reaches beyond unknown oceans who have never even heard the word ‘Orholam.’ I find that infinitely more caring than some bearded giant who emb
races some and smites others without reason.”
Kip had an intuition. What do you do with a fog of deceptions and misdirection? Drag that sonuvabitch into the light.
“I’ve really enjoyed training with Karris,” Kip said. It was a non sequitur if his grandfather weren’t doing what Kip thought he was.
But Andross Guile clapped his hands once with real delight. “Well played, boy!”
“All that about Orholam and laws, just to remind me to keep my oath about not telling her about Zymun?” Kip asked.
“Swords are dulled with constant use, wits, sharpened,” Andross said. But it was a stall. He played his Nine Kings card, and Kip had now played enough games that he realized Andross was almost certainly going to win in a few turns. Kip drew, needing Day of Darkness. He didn’t get it.
Andross seemed to decide to expand. “You want to break your oath, and you’re looking for excuses to do so. But no. That’s not all I’m doing. I’m teaching you how to be a man, Kip. One has duties to one’s family. This, too, is Law. It was a task to which your mother was unequal, and now that you’re an orphan, there is no one else.”
A cold rage settled over Kip like the sheets of ice covering the Karsos Mountains’ peaks, ice that lived through the hottest summer, frozen purity in the embrace of rock. The bluntness of brute certainty hit his faith like an iron hammer hitting ice, shattering and scattering it. Kip had to believe Gavin was alive, because without his protection, his possible vengeance against any who hurt Kip, Kip was naked and vulnerable and surrounded by enemies. He believed because he wanted to believe.
What do you do with a fog of self-deception?
Though the game wasn’t finished, Kip silently gathered his cards, never looking his grandfather in the eye, and left.
Andross Guile didn’t say anything until Kip reached the door. “I should have known you weren’t ready. I misjudged you. A boy you are, still.”
But Kip had kept his oath, which perhaps meant that Andross had gotten exactly what he wanted.
It was enough to keep him up late at night, wondering what he should have done or said instead—which made the training a welcome relief. It was a few hours of total absorption. The language of hand-to-hand combat was direct and simple, the deceptions revealed within seconds, and in Kip’s case, spoken with a very limited vocabulary.
“Form up!” Trainer Fisk barked. “Squads today. We’re doing Specials.”
An appreciative mumble went through the inductees. Specials was the term for the quirky, dangerous assignments Trainer Fisk and Commander Ironfist came up with to challenge the inductees to think creatively. It was a change to the old way of doing things, but Commander Ironfist was fearless. He needed Blackguards immediately, so the old system of graduating in cohorts was out, too.
Now, he’d told them, as soon as they’d learned all the skills they needed and had proven that they had the character needed as well, they could be promoted. For some of them, that might be soon, he said.
Everyone assumed he meant Cruxer and a couple other boys from cohorts ahead of theirs, but everyone hoped it applied to them, too.
There was some grumbling among the senior cohorts, of course, but much of that was alleviated when Ironfist immediately took half of them for final vows. There were new scrubs, too, comprised of young men and women who gazed with awe at even the inductees. That felt odd.
By the Feast of the Longest Night, they’d gone on Specials a dozen times, and seen twenty inductees sworn in as full Blackguards.
But not all the changes had been instituted by Commander Ironfist. As promachos, Andross Guile had immediately set most of the full Blackguards to training the small army the Chromeria kept. In addition, every drafter on the Jaspers, whether enrolled at the school, or doing research there, or even civilians who had long ago left the school, was now required to attend combat classes led by Blackguards.
All of it had been done by Kip’s suggestion to Andross—and he kept that a complete secret. The Blackguards would lynch him for it, though he was still convinced it was the right thing to do.
Though many of the squads experienced turnover, Kip’s squad crystallized with Cruxer, Teia, Big Leo, goofy Ferkudi, mechanical-spectacled Ben-hadad, little Daelos, and Gross Goss, who was currently picking a scab.
“If you put that in your mouth, so help me,” Daelos said.
“I wasn’t gonna,” Goss complained.
“Sure.”
“I don’t see what’s so terrible about it.”
“Form up, nunks,” Cruxer said. He was the undisputed leader of the squad, though challenges could be made every week. Cruxer was the toughest and the best leader. The squad left well enough alone.
“Squad Aleph!” Trainer Fisk barked. “Swear to Orholam, you keep lagging, I’ll bump you down to Yod next week. Asses to your lines. Now!”
Kip’s squad, despite having him in it, was the best squad: they were Aleph—the first letter in the Old Parian alphabet. Kip had asked. Of course, the good squads kept getting members promoted into full Blackguards, so the chaos weakened their teamwork. Cruxer had been offered promotion, which would have made him one of the youngest full Blackguards ever, but he’d turned it down.
Ten squads of six, seven, and eight each lined up. The Specials were different every time, but they were always meant to reinforce some lesson about the Blackguards’ life. Sometimes the special task was simply watching a street corner—where nothing happened. The squads that got those tasks always complained bitterly, of course, because the other tasks were usually a lot more fun.
“Squad Yod! There’s a jeweler off the embassies called Master Athanossos. He has received a ruby worth twenty thousand danars. Bring it here. Go! On the double!”
When they were out of earshot, already jogging up the ramp, he said, “Squad Teth! Steal that ruby from Squad Yod before they get back. If they’re not successful lifting it in the first place, I expect you to do it. No one injured. Use your wits. Go!”
And so it went. Squad Kheth was assigned to shadow a diplomat visiting his mistress on the other side of the city. They were to work in rotations so they weren’t seen, and be ware of the man’s bodyguards, who were mercenaries from the Cloven Shield Company. Squad Zayin was to watch an alley in the slums, and only if a Blackguard inductee came running through the alley were they to do anything—at that point, they were to take whatever it was he or she had and take it to a house in the slums. They didn’t get to know what the item was. Squad Vav was to pick one merchant from one of the prosperous markets. Every member of the squad was to steal something from his stall or store. If they were even noticed—not just caught—they were all to pay him back double, out of their own wages. If they were not caught, they were show their loot to a full Blackguard who would be in the market. Squad He was then to put it all back, again without the merchant noticing.
Squad Daleth was to find the leader of one of the criminal gangs gaining strength among the refugees, and beat up him and his top two lieutenants—and get out without losing anyone to injuries. After they left, Squad Gimel was assigned to take up a position where they could watch. They were to act as reinforcements if it looked like Daleth was in serious trouble. No killing, but anything short of that they would be allowed. If everyone in Squad Daleth swore they hadn’t needed help, those squads would swap rankings.
Squad Beth was set on a fetch-the-item run. Those were the worst. Sometimes they were utterly straightforward, and other times the squad would be attacked by almost anything. It was, of course, a pretty good test for young Blackguards, who never knew when an assassination might be attempted, and had to learn to deal with boredom without losing their edge.
And that left Kip’s squad.
Trainer Fisk grimaced at them. They fully expected to get the hardest assignment. They were the best, after all. “You’ve got a new squaddie. Boy, form up!”
The squad looked at each other as a young mountain Parian came forward. He wasn’t tall, and he had some baby fat
, where his people were famed for their lean height. But they all recognized him. It was Winsen. He’d been part of their class, until he failed out, losing to Kip in the final testing—losing, only Kip had known, on purpose to spite his master.
“We get the bump-outs now?” Big Leo asked.
“How come he gets in?” Ferkudi asked. “He came in twentieth. Why not let fifteen through nineteen first? Even those washouts would be better than him, right?”
Kip didn’t point out that he was number fifteen, thanks.
“Breaker was fifteen,” Daelos said.
Thanks.
“Maybe the others were already gone? Recruited elsewhere or shipped home?” Big Leo asked.
“You don’t think the Lightguard recruited ’em, do you?” Ferkudi asked.
“Lightguard,” Big Leo scoffed. “That’s a rumor.”
Cruxer stepped in. “What’s the word, Winsen?”
Winsen shot a look at Kip. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Are you ladies done with your kopi and chat time?” Trainer Fisk demanded.
“Ladies?” Teia complained. “I was the only one not—”
“Are you interrupting me, nunk?!” Trainer Fisk shouted at her. He walked over and got right in her face. She swallowed and shook her head.
“Good! There’s a man spouting heresy on a street corner, calls himself Lord Arias. Ain’t no lord I ever heard of. He’s one block south of Verrosh. Find him, and beat the hell out of him. Not in your Blackguard garb. Regular clothes.”
It was one thing to go beat up the leaders of a gang who were terrorizing the poor and frightened. Some crazy preacher? That was different.
“How many guards does he have?” Cruxer asked.
“None we know of.”
“So why are—I mean, why should it take all of us to beat him up?” Teia asked. Kip could tell she only narrowly avoided asking what she really wanted to ask: why are we beating up someone just for talking?
“It’s an order,” Trainer Fisk said. “You have a problem following orders?”
Chapter 42
“Soul poison,” Orholam said. “You never told me about the soul poison. Why didn’t you tell me about the soul poison?”