“This is very troubling, big brother, but I hear the ring of truth in your words.” I bow my head. “I will pray for his soul. And deliver your message.”
“I don’t want you to deliver a message, Quentin Naheed.”
“Pardon?”
“I want you to deliver a bullet.”
Chapter 61
Kip came back from training to find his room trashed. His mirror was broken. The legs of his chair were broken. His pillow was slashed open. His mattress was slashed open. The coin purse with his wages he kept hidden on a roof beam had been stolen. His desk’s surface had been scored with a knife, his inkwell upended all over it. His chamber pot had been filled by whoever had done this, and had been emptied in the middle of his bed. A note, carefully tented on heavy wood pulp paper, sat on the desk, slowly wicking up ink.
“I’m done playing games. Come see me immediately.—T.G.”
T.G. The Guile. Because that’s how Andross sees himself. Not as Andross, not as the Red, not even as the promachos, but as the representative of all that is this family. That was the most important thing, to Andross Guile.
The urine was incredibly pungent.
Ugh. Someone’s not drinking enough water.
And to think of that first, someone’s been training with the Blackguard too much.
But aside from that wry thought, Kip was oddly unmoved. So his stuff had been smashed. So what? He’d had less in the past. So his money had been stolen. So what? He didn’t need money. He had friends now, and work to do, things to accomplish. That was infinitely more precious, wasn’t it?
He stared at the mess and knew that he wouldn’t even have to clean it up himself. There were slaves whose services he could borrow from the Chromeria. If this was meant to be a kick in the nuts, old man, you’ve missed. This is barely a kick in the thigh.
In fact, more than anything else this does, it tells me about you. If you did it to irritate me, it’s because you imagined it would work. You imagined it would work because it would work on you. So this is the worst you can imagine happening to you? Can’t bear to be disrespected, can you? Interesting. I’ll remember that.
Kip’s first urge was to go somewhere else, anywhere else. But passive defiance was the old Kip. Passive defiance was indistinguishable from cowardice. He told himself it wasn’t that he cared if Andross thought he was a coward; it was what he thought of himself. He was afraid of the old man. He could accept that fear. It was perfectly rational. But to let himself be controlled by his fear…
Funny how I’m echoing things I’ve heard in Blackguard training as if they’re my own thoughts.
Enough thinking. Kip stepped into the hallway. He spied a slave approaching. “Calun!” he called. “Who’s your master?”
“I serve at the pleasure of Gariban Navid,” the man said, obviously not appreciating being singled out.
“He’s a discipulus?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s been a crime here. Report it to the Black’s desk downstairs. You’re allowed to cut to the front of the line. And ask that they send slaves to clean up the mess once the Black’s men are finished investigating.”
Slaves not serving Colors could be compelled by any free man or woman in an emergency or to report a crime. Of course, it was a privilege that the wise exercised with caution. No one liked a stranger commandeering his property.
“Yes, sir,” the man said.
“Hold,” Kip said. He dug into his purse. One didn’t tip slaves, and Kip only had three danars left, but hell with that. He gave the slave two of them. “Thank you,” he said.
The slave sneered, like Kip didn’t know what he was doing, like Kip was an uncouth mixed breed.
He began walking toward the lifts, and realized that the slave’s presence was terribly convenient. He turned.
“Oh, and if it was you—drink more water,” Kip said.
“Sir?”
“Kidney stones. I hear it’s like having the tip of your penis pounded with a hammer.”
The slave’s face iced over. He looked like he wanted to spit in Kip’s face. “I’ve been cut, sir.”
“Oh. So there’s a bright side to gelding. Never would have thought. Carry on, then.”
Kip knew that he should be taking advantage of his walk to form a plan, an approach to the most masterful manipulator in the Chromeria, but his thoughts kept going in circles. He nodded to the Blackguards, waving the letter in their direction, and opened the door to Andross Guile’s rooms without knocking. It wasn’t locked. That was sort of funny. Andross was so certain that his reputation would scare the hell out of people that he didn’t even have his slave lock his door or command the Blackguards to maintain his privacy. Unless, of course, Grinwoody had simply forgotten to do it. The man was getting older.
A small, mean part of Kip delighted in the hope that Grinwoody was growing senile. He would weep when Andross cast off the old wrinkled sack of excrement. Tears of joy.
Kip moved through the antechamber and saw Grinwoody dozing on his feet, just leaning against the wall next to the door to the inner room. But Grinwoody woke before Kip took three steps.
He was bleary, though, trying to hide that he’d been asleep. Kip handed the old slave the ink-stained note as if it were an invitation and strode right past him.
Andross wasn’t in the main room. Startled, Grinwoody hustled to get back in front of Kip. “You can wait in the—High Lord Guile is—”
“You can kiss the bald spot where my fat thighs rub together,” Kip said. He threw open the bedroom door.
His grandfather was in bed, and he wasn’t alone. Worse, Kip had seen the woman lying next to him before. It was Tisis Malargos, heart-shaped face and pale skin. Lots of pale skin. Just like when she’d tried to kill Kip during the Threshing. Tisis Malargos, who had been a Color for the space of only moments before Gavin had unseated her.
Kip was rooted in place. Tisis’s hair was piled in delicate blonde curls held in a web of emeralds. And her hand was under the sheets, moving up and—oh, dear Orholam!
She didn’t see Kip immediately—or at least he hoped that was why her hand hadn’t stopped moving—but Andross Guile did. He looked up at Kip, and Kip could see the sudden war of Andross Guile’s natures: the calculating spider, already figuring how to turn this surprise back to his own benefit, versus the Red who’d drafted passion and fire and all things hot and burning for decades.
The worst of it might have been that it was far more shocking to see his grandfather naked than Tisis.
Tisis saw that she’d lost Andross’s attention and she followed his gaze. A fraction of an instant of shame passed through her eyes, and then it turned to pure hatred.
“The funny thing is,” Kip found himself saying, “I think I’ve seen you naked more times than I’ve seen you clothed. Huh. I guess if you only have one thing going for you, you’ve got to play it to the hilt, huh? Too bad such a beautiful package has to house such ugliness.”
Tisis was out of the bed in an instant. She was still wearing a slip, though the straps had been pushed down off her shoulders, so apparently Kip had only interrupted their foreplay. Tisis picked up a vase and hurled it at Kip. Her arm tangled in her slip’s straps, and she missed by a league, splashed water over herself, and dropped roses on the floor. And smashed what was probably a priceless vase. “Get out, you—you fat worm! You detestable little, little—bastard! You—” Her pale complexion flared with rage and frustration as she tried to throw items and words and hike up her straps over her shoulders all at the same time.
Interrupting, Kip said, “I like, ‘You fat carbuncle on the ass of a great family.’ I mean, if we’re going for fat jokes. Comparisons with beached whales are routine but acceptable. Bonus points for slipping ‘oleaginous’ in. You know what’s sad? What’s sad is that you probably think what you’re doing is smart. You think you can play Andross Guile and get more out of him than he gets out of you. Pathetic.” Kip’s tongue was fully in charge now. And he didn’t care. The
tongue is a flame, and Kip was throwing fire at every flammable surface he could see. Let it burn. “You know what else is pathetic? My grandfather is so vain that he’s probably convinced himself that you’re falling for his charms. Even though he’s smart enough to know you’re just prostituting yourself. Tell me, Tisis, how do you hide your disgust when you see his body? When you moan, do you worry that he can tell you’re putting him on, or do you despise him because you know he can’t tell?”
She screamed and threw a pillow at him.
A pillow.
“Grinwoody,” Kip said, not turning, but somehow aware of the presence behind him, “you oleaginous worm, if you so much as touch me, I’ll kill you. Think twice before you lay hands on a Guile, even an adipose one.” Kip took in red and yellow—there were colors everywhere in this room—and let them swirl under the skin of his face and neck, going visibly down to his hands. It was the magical equivalent of cocking a pistol.
The slave didn’t touch him.
Andross Guile got up, impassive. The spider in him had won out. Somehow Kip knew it would be a mistake to think he was less dangerous simply because he wasn’t shouting. He was unashamed of his nudity.
Which makes one of us.
“Enough,” Andross said.
“Enough?!” Tisis shouted. “Enough?”
He slapped her, without passion.
It caught Tisis unaware. His big meaty hand caught her across the neck and cheek. Her head snapped to the side and she dropped to the thick carpet, not even trying to arrest her fall. She was unconscious. For a moment, Kip was afraid she was dead.
Apparently, it was a concern Andross shared. He knelt over her, poking fingers into her neck. Satisfied by what he found, he stood.
“That worked rather better than I expected,” Andross said. “Grinwoody, put down the knife. My robe. Then attend to Lady Malargos. She’s easily embarrassed, so cover her before you use the smelling salts.”
As Grinwoody draped the robe across Andross’s bare shoulders, the promachos turned to Kip. “So, you got my note. I wasn’t expecting you yet. Thought you’d sulk for a while. Come, let’s sit in my parlor.”
Kip followed him into the main room of the apartments where they’d played Nine Kings so many times. Like this was normal.
“You’re not even going to try to deny it?” Kip asked. “You trashed my room and pissed on my bed. Destroyed everything. Stole my money.”
“Well, not personally. Brandy?”
“No, I don’t want your damn brandy!”
“That’s too bad.” Andross poured two glasses anyway, and put one in front of Kip. He sat in his chair and gestured for Kip to sit across from him. “Knowledge of fine alcohols is mostly an affectation, but an important one. Men respect those who have greater knowledge of the trivial than they do, when that trivia is costly. Nothing more so than spirits.”
“Here’s the thing,” Kip said. He was saying ‘Here’s the thing’ a lot recently. It irritated him. Why didn’t he just launch into what he had to say? “Here’s the thing.” Dammit, twice! “It isn’t that you would tear up my room that I find surprising. You’ve tried to have me killed before, so I don’t really think anything is beneath you. It isn’t even that you would claim the action after you did it. I know you like watching people jump. I think you were trapped in this room so long becoming a wight that you needed people to come to you so you didn’t only hear second- or thirdhand accounts. You learned to become obvious so you’d get the thrill of having some power in this world. I understand all that,” Kip said. “You’re a pathetic shut-in who is suddenly not shut in anymore, and you aren’t adjusting to it well.”
Andross’s eyes, so amused mere seconds ago, turned into wells of darkness. He sipped his brandy as if watching Kip dig his own grave.
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Kip said. “How could you be so stupid?”
An arched eyebrow.
“I am of you,” Kip said. “I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I’m as cold as you, I’m as smart as you, and when you push me, I’m as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don’t know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is.”
“Hmm. Words, like the stench of a fart,” Andross said. He waved a hand as if to dispel them. “You’re marshaling them better than you did, but don’t bring your games to me. We’re past that now. There is nothing about you that inspires fear, Kip. Your very name is insubstantial. Kip.” He smirked condescension. “Words without actions are weightless. Throw them against this wall, and see? Nothing.”
Kip wondered how fast he could draft. He wondered if it was faster than Grinwoody and Andross together. He wanted to kill them both. He wanted to stand up and piss on Andross Guile himself to show what he thought of him. But he didn’t think he could get away with it, and having emptied both barrels of his rhetoric in Andross Guile’s face and having hit nothing, he felt suddenly vulnerable, empty. There was no more powder at hand. He was the barely acknowledged bastard, alone, insulting the Guile, throwing epithets and disrespect at the promachos himself.
And all he had at hand was the fact that he didn’t care if he wrecked himself.
Paltry ammunition indeed. He did his best to keep his sudden fear off his face, but if there was one emotion Andross Guile was attuned to, it was others’ fear. He fed on it.
“Want that brandy now?” Andross asked archly, the very personification of a lupine grin.
“I’ll take it,” Kip said, keeping his voice level.
“No you won’t,” Andross said.
The glass was sitting within easy reach. Kip thought of snatching for it—and then thought, how fast Fortune’s wheel turns. One moment, I threaten death in high dudgeon. The next, I grub for a glass of brandy.
And this was part of Andross Guile’s curious power. Another lord might have thought denying his guest a drink was simple rudeness, and been above it. Andross Guile didn’t mind if he lowered himself, as long as he lowered his opponent more. Indeed, shame was a tool to be used against others, because Andross himself was shameless.
Perhaps literally so. He had gotten out of bed naked, without even acknowledging the fact. He seemed unperturbed about being naked, despite having all the spots and wrinkles and sagging skin of a man his age. Though Kip could swear that the paunch Andross had carried was shrinking, he stood at the antipodes from his beautiful son Gavin. Nor did he seem more than peeved at being interrupted pre-coitus.
Perhaps Kip was a poor judge. His own glass of self-horror was constantly full, so the slightest additional drip made the whole thing spill over. But even a normal person would be embarrassed at such a thing, wouldn’t they?
Kip had assumed that his grandfather was ashamed, and had simply controlled it. That his sudden rage had been a cover over the embarrassment. What if, instead, there was a simple void where shame would be for others, and the rage had been merely for Kip interrupting whatever plan Andross had in place to snare Tisis?
A dozen times, Kip had wondered how his grandmother, by all accounts a good woman, had loved this man.
And now another thought occurred to him. What if, instead of loving Andross, she’d loved the world? What if she’d seen herself as the only one who could keep this wolf from the flocks? Felia Guile had been smart, everyone agreed on that. She’d been an orange. She’d been the only person who could get Andross Guile to change his mind. She’d been the bulwark against the storm.
And now she was gone.
Kip was staring at an old man with saggy skin sitting in a faded robe, the bare skin of his legs almost translucent, almost obscene in itself—and he was the one who suddenly felt naked.
“What do you want?” he asked. “You’re old. What does winning even look like for you?”
“Old?” Andross chuckled. “I’ve got a good
twenty years left. Kip, if you and Zymun don’t pan out for me, I can start a new family and still have time to groom the next generation. I have the options of a young man again, but with all the advantages I didn’t have when I was young. Do you not know your family’s history?”
Kip wasn’t looking for a lesson. “I looked back as far as my grandfather and gave up in disgust,” he said. It was the best insult he could slip around the thick knot of fear blocking his throat.
“A weaker man would say I owe you, Kip. For what you did on that ship about my… surfeit of red. But I’m not that man. I respect that you have the strength to not be groveling at my feet. However. Defiance is initially interesting, but it grows tiresome quickly.”
“I’d love to hear about the family,” Kip said snidely. The mere fact that he could say ‘the’ family and not ‘your’ family was a huge victory.
“You’ve killed my desire to reminisce. Let it be enough to say that I earned everything we have. By my generation, we were wool merchants—wool merchants with debts and a worthless title that my drunken wastrel older brother nearly sold to pay them. Everything we are—even you, little bastard who’s weaseled his way into legitimacy—is because of what I’ve made us.”
“You wrested control of the family from your brother?” Kip asked, incredulous.
“Wrested? I’ve had more trouble with a bowel movement. I handed Abel a stack of papers for his signature when he was hungover. He barely glanced at them. I paid his own steward a few danars to countersign as a witness, saying it was contracts for warehouses. He didn’t read them either. I seized all the accounts, and my brother didn’t even have the money to pay a solicitor to bring it to a magistrate. Nor the friends willing to lend him such sums.”
Kip reached out for the brandy, unthinking, and this time Andross let him take it. “Oh, thanks,” Kip said automatically.
Andross grinned, as if this too were a victory.
“You’re telling me that three generations of Guile brothers have been at each other’s throats?” Kip asked.
“Three? No. Six that I know of. There was a tale that a witch cursed us when Memnon Guile wed her and then, as we Guiles do, cheated on her. Or more precisely, she found out that he was already wed back home. He left her brokenhearted and wandered the world, having adventures, and when finally he arrived home years later, he was murdered by his brother, who had taken to… comforting his wife in his brother’s absence. Since then. That was six hundred years ago, though I personally doubt that our blood has even a drop of that Guile’s blood in it. Many other families have taken the names of the heroes of old; I’m not sure why we would be different. Not that such a thing bears repeating in public, yes? Regardless, the tale held enough force that it was said in our family that if your wife was older, and you already had one son, not to have any more children, lest you end up with two boys. Not that a son and a daughter guaranteed any better. Selene Guile the First had more mercy than most of the men in our family—or less, depending on what you value. She exiled her brother Adan Guile, after castrating him so that he would have no heirs. She managed to get one of the kings of her era to make the family name and title matrilineal. Which it stayed for a hundred and fifty years, until an enterprising Guile son managed to wrest control back.”