The Blinding Knife

  “I’ll be at the Red Six Inn later, if you’re looking for some entertainment, gorgeous,” the man said. His hand was still on her butt.

  She swatted his hand away. “No, thank you, my lord. Excuse me.”

  He laughed and didn’t try again. “Think about it,” he said. “I’ll show you a better night than your husband ever could.”

  She ducked her head shyly and walked away, feeling violated. She swore she could still feel his hand on her. She wanted to punch him in his grinning face for groping her.

  Instead, she contented herself with dropping the snuff box into her bag. He’d caught her off guard, but Teia had recovered quickly.

  She turned as he walked on and, drafting, snatched the beacon off his head. If she was smart, she should get the hell out of here, but she couldn’t help trying to peer deeper into the market to catch sight of the woman.

  It wasn’t hard to spot her. She still had her beacon glowing on her head, though it was already dissipating, and her skin was pale enough that it evinced the slight tea green tint of a longtime drafter. She crossed the main street of the market, carrying the melon. One of her arms fell and she dropped the melon. She smiled, as if surprised and confused, but only half of her face moved. She staggered and suddenly fell.

  A couple of people grinned and chuckled. But the woman didn’t get up. She started having a seizure. Apoplexy. A stroke.

  The smiles disappeared, and people began running toward her.

  “Someone, help! Chirurgeons!” a bystander shouted.

  Dread shot through Teia. Orholam have mercy, what had she just seen?

  Chapter 33

  The great hall of the Chromeria was converted every week into a place of worship. Every student, drafter or not, was required to attend. Kip shuffled into his place in the pew between Ben-hadad and Teia. Ben-hadad was flicking down the colored lenses of his odd spectacles, staring from the white marble of the arches to the many-colored stained glass panels of the clerestory.

  Kip was too absorbed in what was happening on the floor to even begin to parse the scenes depicted above them in the stained glass. “So what do we do?” he asked.

  “Mmm?” Ben-hadad asked.

  “We listen,” Teia said. Her tone was short, withdrawn, unusual for her. “It’s the second week of the cycle, so I think the Blue himself will be speaking.”

  “Oh no,” Ben-hadad said. “He’s the worst. I heard from one of the glims that last year Gavin Guile preached on the Blue day and that he was amazing. But what’s-his-name is awful.”

  “Klytos Blue,” Kip said. He felt a weight of dread. His target.

  “He tries to be scholarly because he thinks that’s how blues are supposed to be, but I’ve heard the real scholars mocking him.”

  Kip didn’t care, though he hoped he could dislike the man he had sworn to destroy. It would be his first chance to see Klytos Blue in person. He found that his heart was pounding.

  The great hall slowly filled, with a big rush of people coming in at the last minute before noon. Even as the people were still entering, a low choral chant rose from a pit hidden near the front. “What’s that?” Kip whispered.

  “The sub-reds’ men’s choir,” Ben-hadad said, still staring up at the light pouring in through the clerestory.

  “Shh,” Teia said, intent on the music. Cranky.

  “Why don’t the blues do their own music?” Kip asked Ben-hadad.

  “Don’t know. It’s just a special thing they do.” Ben-hadad grinned suddenly and pulled his eyes down from the ceiling. “Sub-reds are always passionate, of course, but the men are almost always sterile. Both of which make them quite popular with the ladies.”

  “Musically talented doesn’t hurt either,” Teia said wistfully.

  “What?” Kip asked Ben-hadad. “Why?”

  Ben-hadad’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Why Kip, hasn’t your father explained the Seventy Ways of a Man with a Maid to you?” Teia asked.

  “That wasn’t what I meant. I was—?” Oh, she knew that. She was grinning as he blushed.

  Seventy?

  She relented and, speaking low, said, “No one knows why they’re sterile. It’s just part of their burden and their sacrifice to Orholam.”

  “Shh!” a girl in the row in front of them said, turning around, irritated.

  The choir began a new song, and this time many of the congregation joined in. Kip had no idea what they were saying. He could only guess that it was archaic Parian. It was beautiful, though, and he was glad that he didn’t understand it. He could soak in pure music.

  Two great skylights lit up suddenly with more than the noonday sun. Kip guessed that two of the great mirrors on top of the other towers had been turned toward the great hall, which of course had an entire tower above it, so it couldn’t let in light from straight above. So the mirrors stood in to let Orholam’s light shine upon his people.

  There was more singing, and then a procession of blue-robed men and women, some swinging censers full of smoking incense. Kip watched as Klytos Blue, dressed in a blue silk robe with a high starched collar and wearing a strange blue hat, walked within several paces of him. The man looked uncomfortable, barely enduring this.

  Kip didn’t like him.

  Orholam, Seventy Ways? Kip could only really imagine two.

  Who could you ask about that sort of thing? They’d laugh at him like he was a bumpkin.

  There was kneeling and prayers and readings and responses from five thousand throats. Kip moved his mouth and pretended to know what was going on. His mother had never had time for luxiats. She’d feared Orholam’s judgment, mostly saying that if you kept your head down, you might escape the wrath you deserved.

  Then Klytos Blue came to the lectern and began speaking so softly that even the people in the front row probably couldn’t have heard a word. He was so awkwardly shy that Kip felt a stab of cruel compassion for the man. One of the luxiats approached him quietly and whispered to him.

  Klytos raised his voice to a mumble: “… under eye of… this forty-ninth day…”

  Kip saw the luxiat eyeing another luxiat, communicating with glances. The other luxiat got up and murmured to Klytos Blue, who spoke sharply back to the man, flushed, and then turned back to his papers.

  “As I was saying,” Klytos shrilled, finally speaking loudly enough that even those in the back could hear him. He sneered, “It is part of the Chromeria’s work to bring the most recent work of scholars to blinkered corners of our world. Not long ago, it was considered heresy to speak of our world as if it were anything but a rolled-out parchment. People believed that the world had actual corners—luxiats most of all. Thanks to the blues and to the blue virtues, we now know this to be superstition and not in conflict with the scriptures which were speaking only metaphorically of the satrapies being the center. The center of Orholam’s will is a metaphorical statement, not a spatial one.”

  Kip had no idea what he was talking about, but a couple of the luxiats didn’t look particularly pleased with this turn. Kip guessed that if Klytos lowered his voice another time, none of them was going to remind him to raise it again.

  “In the last few years, there has been some exciting work done by your compeers in the Tower of Reason regarding the Great Schism and the events that flowed out of the Deimachia, the War of the Gods which most scholars now agree is better translated the War on the Gods. The ‘dei’ of course is the ablative, and in most of our translations, there’s simply not enough contextual evidence to support overturning the generally accepted ‘war of.’ However, in Tristaem’s On the Fundaments of Reason, he points out that with only a few changes in how we understand old Parian grammar, our entire hermeneutics is shifted. These shifts are under way now.”

  Kip’s eyes began to glaze over. There were simply too many words he didn’t understand. Even if he did think grammar was interesting, he couldn’t have followed if he’d wanted to. He lost the stream and began looking around the room instead. One old
luxiat in her rumpled black robe looked like she was chewing on a lemon. Several of the older students actually looked fascinated, and Kip despaired. Am I going to turn into that?

  He’d thought that the Chromeria was a place of learning, yes, but a place of practical learning. He began studying the stained glass mosaics that lined the entire clerestory. There was Lucidonius himself, white-robed and soft-looking, surrounded by his Parian warriors, but his skin a couple of shades lighter than theirs. That was interesting. Kip had always heard he was a Parian outsider.

  Oh, maybe he was an outsider even to the Parians.

  Kip suddenly imagined furious arguments over exactly what color Lucidonius’s skin color had been when the stained glass had gone in. He knew the Parians claimed him, especially over their rivals in riches and power, their neighbors the pale-skinned Ruthgari. The darker Lucidonius was, the more of a poke in the eye it would be to the Ruthgari.

  And now, despite that the stained glass had gone in hundreds of years after Lucidonius died, people would look at the windows and assume that because they were old, they must be accurate.

  Fascinating. Kip wished he knew.

  Oh, hell. That’s exactly what old windy up there is doing, isn’t it? Turning the world on the parsing of a word, like Kip was imagining the world turned on a bit of pigment in a window.

  The Blue had lowered his voice again, and Kip had to lean forward to hear him now. But he’d said a word that had caught Kip’s attention: Lightbringer. “… which is why the Lightbringer is best understood as a metaphor for each one of us. Each of us is to bring light into the dark corners of the world. Not through missionary zeal. If the religions of those beyond the Everdark Gates are serving the barbarians out there well, who are we to change who they are? Are they not also the children of Orholam? We are to bring light into the dark corners of our own lives, by being kind and generous, by speaking well of others, by loving extravagantly. The Lightbringer is not coming. Hear O Children of Am, the Lightbringer is not one. We are Lightbringers all.”

  The luxiats’ eyes all seemed ready to pop out of their heads as they ran screaming from the room to bathe themselves in milk.

  Kip almost burst out laughing at the image.

  Holy shit, Kip. Gotta get more sleep.

  The High Luxiat took the dais. He didn’t even look at Klytos Blue. “Choir,” he said, “I wonder if you could close us with ‘Father of Lights, Forgive Us.’ ” It wasn’t, apparently, the song that had been planned.

  Oh, nice.

  But the men sang it, and they sang beautifully.

  Everyone shuffled out after the song and Kip asked Ben-hadad, “So what was all that?”

  “A lie from the pit of hell,” Ben-hadad said. Two girls in the row in front of them turned and glanced at him, but he was heedless. “There have always been fights about the Lightbringer. Who he is, or will be, or if he already came. The Chromeria says he already came, that Lucidonius was the Lightbringer. His name means ‘light giver,’ after all.”

  “But you don’t buy that?” Kip asked.

  “I don’t know all the arguments, but my parents don’t believe it.”

  Kip looked at him. It was one of the dumber things he’d ever heard, and by the sudden glum look on Ben-hadad’s face, he could tell the boy knew it, too.

  “I don’t want to live after history is settled,” Ben-hadad said.

  Which was also dumb: I don’t like how the world is, so it isn’t that way? At least this time Kip was able to keep himself from saying it.

  “The Lightbringer is going to be a genius of magic,” Teia suddenly said. She’d been unusually quiet until now. “A warrior who sweeps all before him. He will be great from his youth. He’s going to do things no one ever thought was possible, and bring us back to the true path. Lucidonius wasn’t even a good drafter. He figured out how to make colored lenses, but that hardly makes him a genius, does it? The Lightbringer will protect us. He will slay gods and kings.”

  I killed a king.

  A chill washed down Kip’s back.

  “There are no kings anymore,” an older boy said, butting in. “Lucidonius killed the last of them. And the last gods.”

  “Lucidonius’s people did that,” Ben-hadad said. “Not Lucidonius himself.”

  “It’s the same thing,” the boy said. “When you say, ‘The Color Prince seized Garriston,’ you don’t mean he picked it up. You don’t even mean that he took it by himself. You mean it was done at his will. It’s—”

  “Children!” a black-robed luxiat said, disgusted. Kip wondered how long the man had been listening. “Wielding half-remembered foolishness from your parents and superstitions from the benighted. Get to your lectures. I’ll not have your blasphemies in this holy place. Now! Out!”

  Chapter 34

  “That dress doesn’t do justice to your beauty,” a young man said to Liv as she emerged from a warehouse some of the displaced women and their children had taken over in Garriston. “Nor do those quarters do justice to your gifts.” He smiled the smile of a man who knows he’s gorgeous. “I’m Zymun. I’m your tutor.”

  And he would have been gorgeous, had not his entire look been spoiled by the bandage over his nose, and two black eyes. Zymun looked maybe sixteen or seventeen, Liv’s age, but maybe older, or maybe he simply carried himself like he was older. He had a mop of curly black hair, an aquiline nose made even bigger by the bandage over it, a wide mouth, and perfect bright white teeth. Atashian skin, heavy brows, light blue eyes with a ring of many colors beneath the halo. He wore a new white shirt—who had new shirts, just after a huge battle?—and over his sleeves, his forearms were covered with multicolored vambraces with five thick bands of color against a white background. He wore a sparkling clean cloak that echoed the pattern, from a black fuzzy band for sub-red to red, orange, yellow, and green. A five-color polychrome. Five!

  There were only perhaps twenty five-color polys in the Chromeria. Maybe a few more still in training. If this boy was cocky, it was for good reason.

  Insufferable.

  “You lose a fight?” Liv asked. How rude!

  “Failed an assassination attempt, actually. Took a punch in the face. And got beaten for my failure when I got back. After swimming through shark-infested waters.” He smiled.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Terrible sense of humor, if I were. It’s not very funny, is it?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Second time’s the charm, I guess. Come, we need to get you out of those rag—those clothes and into something more becoming.”

  He was her tutor, put over her by Lord Omnichrome himself, so Liv supposed that meant she had to obey him. She shrugged and followed him through the city. The warehouse wasn’t far from the Travertine Palace, because it felt safer to be close to the soldiers. Being a woman alone during wartime meant never being off your guard.

  But as Liv followed Zymun, she saw that his garb was better than armor. “Is everyone so afraid of drafters here?” she asked.

  “Afraid? They respect us, which is only right, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so? Ah. So this is why you needed a tutor.”

  Well that was patronizing, and Liv didn’t appreciate it one bit.

  “The Chromeria makes slaves, Liv. It depends on making those it trains being so indebted to them that you become at best an indentured servant—with the term of your indenture being the rest of your life. A slave, in other words. The Free reject that. We recognize instead the natural order as it is. Did you choose to be born a great beauty? Of course not. But you are. You can do with that what you will. Similarly, you were born a drafter. We can wish that all were born with our gifts, and the Color Prince is investigating how this might be done. But the fact remains, we are special. We have a gift that other men and women don’t. We didn’t do anything to earn that gift—we can’t choose to be drafters. But we are. We don’t ask those who have gifts to chain themselves, as we
don’t ask those who are skilled in running to get fat so they don’t make us feel bad for being slow. We are what we are, as wild and free as nature made us. When you walk the streets as a drafter, men know that if they accost you, you can kill them. They can fear that or simply respect it like they’d respect a woman carrying a pistol. With the advantage, of course, being that a pistol only has one shot.”

  They passed workers clearing rubble-strewn streets and finally arrived at a little store undamaged in the fighting. An old woman greeted her. “So good to have business! Thank you, thank you, oh, and so beautiful you are! A marvel I’ll make you. I have an order for three dresses, yes?” she asked Zymun.

  “If that’s what Lord Omnichrome ordered,” Zymun said.

  “Very well then, strip down,” she told Liv.

  Liv looked at her, then over at Zymun, who showed no inclination to leave. “Do you mind?” she asked him.

  He looked her up and down, grinning mischievously. “Very much, but as you wish. Can’t fault me for trying.”

  He stepped outside and left her in the capable hands of the seamstress. The woman took her measurements quickly, compared it to her height, had her turn around a few times, and then allowed her to dress. She made three quick sketches and showed them to Liv. “Everything is to be the finest possible for you, my lady. This first will be wool, but it’s a goat’s wool from the Abornean mountains. Warm, but so soft you won’t believe it.”

  “That sounds…” Wonderful? Amazing? “… expensive.” Liv hated herself for saying it, but she’d been poor for so long, she couldn’t help it.

  “Ha! That’s not the start of it. I’m doing the trim of your silk dress with true murex purple. The finest silk, too, of course. Who’s going to waste true purple to dye bad silk? Ten thousand murex shells harvested just for you.”

  Liv felt a little sick to her stomach. Silk? True purple? “I meant… I’m really sorry. What I meant is, I don’t have any money. Maybe plain wool? Just one dress?” Truth was, she didn’t even have the money to pay for that, but her pride couldn’t take admitting utter poverty.