The Blinding Knife

  “Oh, you pretty little thing, you don’t have to pay! The Lord Omnichrome is taking care of everything. One warm dress, one for everyday wear—that one will be upland Atashian cotton—and one to dazzle. Looks like you could use some new shifts and undergarments, too?”

  “Please! I don’t generally… well, war, you know.”

  “Of course, of course. And we’ll get you a clean dress to wear in the meantime.”

  That offer turned into a clean dress and a hot bath, ostensibly because the old woman didn’t want her getting the dress dirty, but Liv thought the seamstress was happy to have someone to spoil, someone to talk to.

  As she scrubbed herself with a sponge and let the hot water unknot her muscles, Liv fought the rush of tears just below the surface. She blew out a breath, feeling like she could cry and she would feel better afterward, but she didn’t want to look all splotchy and swollen. She was sure the old woman wouldn’t care—she had the air of someone who’d understand—but Zymun would come back to pick her up later, and he’d ask. And how can you explain why you were crying when the answer would either take an hour or one word? Neither would make him understand. She’d just look like a weak girl.

  Liv blew out another breath.

  “That’s a lot of sighing,” the old woman said. Liv hadn’t noticed her come in.

  “Have you ever realized that everything you ever believed was a lie?”

  “Everything? The sky is green now?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Teasing, child.” The old woman paused, then heaved a little sigh of her own. “I believed my husband was faithful to me. When that fell, it seemed like all the world did with it.”

  Liv hesitated.

  “No, child. Don’t tell me. I’m a stranger. Take my kindness, but don’t trust so much, so easily. You’re a beautiful young woman in a perilous place. Put on some armor. Just remember what’s armor and what’s you, so when it’s time to take it off, you can.”

  The old woman walked out, and Liv knew that she’d done her a kindness greater than she could have by listening to her churning thoughts.

  Liv had joined the enemy. She could excuse herself and say that she’d hoped her action might inspire the Color Prince to save Kip and Karris, and it had, but in truth she’d lost faith in everything the Chromeria had taught her. If the fruit is poison, why respect the tree?

  But if the Chromeria itself was corrupt, how deep did that corruption go? If they’d taught one lie, how many others had they espoused? It made her feel sick to her stomach, like she was looking into the abyss. If the Chromeria was corrupt, and the Chromeria was supposed to be a central font of Orholam’s will, what did that say about Orholam himself?

  How could he let such corruption be? Either he didn’t care, or he didn’t have the power to do anything about it, or he didn’t exist. Liv felt a chill despite the hot water. It was a thought that couldn’t be called back.

  But there was no answer. Doesn’t care, can’t fix, or doesn’t exist. No matter what, things were not as Liv had believed. It was like having a nice warm cloak of comforting suppositions ripped off her shoulders.

  So be it. This was what it was to be an adult, to be a strong woman. Her father had raised her to believe certain things, but her father wasn’t omniscient. He could be wrong. And if he was, Liv wasn’t going to be a moral coward. She would face the world as it was.

  She’d once heard an old philosopher quoted in one of her classes: ‘The truth is so dear to me that if Orholam stood on one side and truth on the other, I would turn my back on my creator himself.’

  So be it. Fealty to One, that was the Danavis motto. Liv’s fealty would be to the truth.

  Simply considering that was scary, terrifying as she thought about the decisions she made all the time based on what was right—which was based on what was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria taught was holy—which was based on what the Chromeria believed about Orholam. Taking out that linchpin?

  But at the same time, it was tremendously freeing. She would be strong. This was hard, but she would do it. She wouldn’t shrink from hard truths or embrace comforting delusions. She would be a warrior for truth.

  She finished bathing, the impulse to tears forgotten, steel in her spine. And then she ate what the old woman brought her, though it was only a thin broth dotted with a few potatoes.

  “It isn’t up to my normal standards, but well, war, you know,” the old woman said, a twinkle in her eye.

  Liv laughed.

  “After I finish your dresses, I’ll be able to serve you something much better, I promise.”

  When she was finished, Liv felt a thousand times better. She thanked the old woman and stepped outside.

  Zymun was sitting on a crude bench, tossing little blue disks out of one hand into the air and shooting them with green from the other.

  “You were waiting for me the whole time?” Liv asked.

  He tossed a blue disk up and blasted it into oblivion, harder than necessary.

  “Oh. I forgot about you,” she said. Oops, that didn’t come out quite like she meant it.

  “You get away with that shit because you’re beautiful?” Zymun asked. “If so, quit it.”

  “You keep saying that. I don’t know if you’re trying to make a backhanded compliment or a stupid forehanded insult.” She wasn’t beautiful. She knew that. On her best day, she could manage a bit of cute. Anyone who said different was trying to get something from her.

  Zymun looked like he was going to tear into her, but then his mouth twitched. “ ‘Forehanded insult’?” he asked. “That your own invention?” But he grinned.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.” She scowled, feeling stupid. “I thought you weren’t a blue,” she said quickly. He had five colors on his cloak and vambraces, but not blue and not superviolet.

  “Not yet,” he said. He drafted another blue disk. Liv could tell the color was off, and in barely more than a second it frayed apart and dissolved. “Hoping I grow into it. It’s so close it’s infuriating. Blue has so many uses. Plus, as nice as it already is to be a five, I can’t help but dream of being a full-spectrum polychrome.”

  He was reaching to be a seven-color drafter with exactly the same kind of statements Liv had used a few months ago when she was longing to have her second color recognized. It was never enough, was it? There’s always someone better than you.

  Still, if seven colors might be within reach for Zymun, that meant the boy was on another plane altogether.

  “Sorry about forgetting,” Liv said, looking at her feet. “I didn’t think I was important enough for you to wait around for me.”

  He smiled, and broken nose, black eyes, and all, he was terribly handsome. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  Chapter 35

  It was strangely freeing to be so busy that he had no time for friends—or his lack thereof. Over the next weeks, Kip spent his mornings in class and working, spent hours more on the Blackguards’ field, and then headed to the library. He got to know the staff, and they him. As often as not, a stack of books was waiting for him—the ones he requested every day, plus whatever ones Rea Siluz thought he might find helpful.

  He would find an isolated desk, and not leave for eight or ten hours, depending on when the last librarian left. Every day he scowled at the older students, and stayed late with them a few times—until he was discovered and banned from the library for a week. Students also weren’t allowed to reshelve their own books. Apparently so many had done so incorrectly for so long that it became a nightmare for the librarians. Now, after being read, books were to be deposited at one of the two desks for the purpose on each level of the library. Kip also quickly learned that despite taking up three full levels of the Prism’s Tower, this library was only a small sliver of the total number of books the Chromeria owned. Many more were kept below ground. Dims were not allowed in the secondary libraries, period.

  All of which combined
to make Kip’s other searches nearly impossible to even begin. He had sworn to avenge his mother—and crushing King Garadul’s head somehow hadn’t made that ache go away. Then he’d sworn to find out if his mother was lying about Gavin Guile. He couldn’t imagine the man had actually raped her, but liar and addict and horror though she was, she still deserved that of her son.

  Of greater concern, though, was that he’d sworn to make Klytos Blue step down.

  He really had to stop swearing.

  The problem with both goals was that he barely knew where to start. He couldn’t exactly ask, “Pardon, can you tell me where the damning evidence about the currently serving Colors and Prisms is kept?” And with his books being checked up on, any wider reading he did want to do had to be done carefully. Kip had found several books of genealogy to learn about Klytos Blue, and then waited until he saw one of the young women who assisted the libraries reshelving books and slid his books into her stacks.

  At this rate, he’d never find anything. There was only one shortcut to get to the libraries that might have the information he needed: make it into the Blackguard.

  So what had begun as something he attempted to please his father whose ultimate purpose he didn’t understand now became the only possibility. Kip trained and studied and read books in the library and didn’t sleep much, nightmares interrupting his rest every night, until he would crash and sleep for a day or two straight.

  There was no punishment for missing class. The Chromeria let the sponsors handle that. It made Sponsor Day deeply unpleasant for those students who loafed. But Kip didn’t have a sponsor. He went to class, though, even when he hated it. To miss would be to disappoint his father, to be a failure.

  And then fight day came, the culmination of the month’s training.

  Though Kip was clearly the worst in class, by entering at number four he’d made it terribly unlikely that he could fail out this month. But the entire system was designed to force the cream of the class to rise. On testing day, each student was given a fight token. The testing started at the bottom, with the lowest-ranked students given a chance. Number forty-nine would go first. He could only challenge someone within three places, and if he won, he would be awarded that person’s fight token, which he could immediately use again to keep climbing.

  Before they started, a boy asked the trainer, “Trainer Fisk, sir? Why do we have to fight with the spotlights instead of giving us spectacles?”

  The trainer said, “You ask now? Why not ask when you started?”

  “I, uh—everything was new,” the boy said. Kip could tell the truth. The boy had been too intimidated to ask then.

  “Anyone have a guess?” the trainer asked.

  “Spectacles could break in training, and they’re worth a fortune,” Teia said.

  “And the glass could blind us if it broke,” someone else chimed in.

  “True, but those aren’t the most important reasons,” Trainer Fisk said. “Let me tell a little story. Far as I know, it’s true. Back in the days of Prism Karris Shadowblinder, just after Lucidonius himself had introduced colored lenses to the world, there was a young man who joined the Ilytian Heresy, though the same could have happened to anyone. Blue drafter named Gilliam. He had his blue lenses, and he never took them off. It was a time of wars to make ours look paltry, so none blamed him. The lenses were a symbol of power, and of status, of course. The technology to create colored lenses was known to only a few, so having the lenses showed that you were wealthy as well. He was in many battles over the years, mostly on the wrong side, but that’s neither here nor there. A number of years later, he tried to assassinate Prism Shadowblinder. He cut through her guards handily, and then he faced the Prism herself. She berated him for using the spectacles her own husband had given him to fight her. She berated him for using them too much.

  “But of course he thought she was stalling, and he tried to kill her again. She snatched the spectacles from his face. It was an overcast day; there was no blue for him to draft, and in moments he was hamstrung. She asked him then if he understood. He didn’t. She picked up a simple iron spear and told him to stop her. Of course it was impossible. He looked everywhere for blue. There was none. And then, as she came closer, he felt the reds and greens and yellows sliding into his eyes. He was a full-spectrum polychrome, and he’d never known.

  “But having never used the colors, he couldn’t control them, couldn’t bind them to his will in the time he had. And she slew him as he screamed. He who has ears, let him hear.”

  Kip looked around. Some of the scrubs were nodding, like this all made perfect sense. Others looked like he felt.

  “He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness,” Teia murmured. He could tell she hadn’t just made that up. It had a weight of antiquity to it.

  “Enough questions, we’ve got work here. Places!” Trainer Fisk said. And that was it. No explanation. Fantastic.

  Forty-nine, a slight, awkward boy with crooked teeth, challenged forty-six as everyone expected he would. Forty-six was a beefy girl, nearly twice his size, but slow. If she lost, she would lose her fight token and her chance to challenge those above her, so it was do or die for both of them.

  “What’s your strategy?” Teia asked Kip.

  Forty-nine and forty-six approached the great wheels, each spinning one. Depending on where the whizzing counters landed, they would have different rules for their fight. It was another aspect of the Blackguard ethos: you never knew under what circumstances you might have to fight, or with what weapons. You could get lucky or unlucky, and you had to deal with it.

  The boy’s roll landed at yellow and green. The girl’s at staves.

  “What do you mean?” Kip asked, entranced by what was happening in front of them.

  Shutters were drawn and the battleground was bathed in yellow and green light. The boy and girl walked to Trainer Fisk, who stood by a small podium, and they both pushed their fingers onto two points of black rock and then were given staves. They saluted each other and began fighting. They were awkward, so bad that even Kip might have had a chance against them.

  The girl attacked, her first shot rattling hard against the boy’s block, and her very next swing going through and catching him on the side of the head. He fell heavily, not unconscious, but jellied.

  The boy got up to his knees, then fell over again.

  The girl was declared the winner, and forty-nine burst into tears. There was no way he could stay in the Blackguard. He was done.

  “Don’t feel sorry for him,” Teia said. “Failing out may keep him from getting killed, either next month or down the line. The Blackguard can only be the best.”

  “Someone is going to go home today for me,” Kip said.

  She looked at him, quizzical. “So, you don’t have a strategy?”

  He stared back. She wasn’t getting it. “Teia, I’m terrible. I’ll fight the best I can, but I’ll lose. It’s that simple.” He wasn’t going to disappoint Gavin any more than necessary.

  Forty-eight went next—and instead of challenging forty-five, instead he challenged the girl at forty-six.

  “Why’d he—”

  “She’s already fought once, so she might be tired,” Adrasteia said.

  And so it was. Forty-eight and forty-six fought a purely mundane fight—the colors he’d spun were colors that neither of them could draft. Forty-six won, and challenged forty-three. She won again, and challenged forty, but lost.

  As he watched and pieced together why people were sometimes choosing to fight three places up and sometimes only the person directly above, Kip asked Teia questions. Pretty quickly he figured out that there was as much strategy here as at Nine Kings.

  Oh hell no.

  People would sometimes not fight their friends, because they didn’t want to make them lose places or challenge tokens. Other times people would fight those whom they thought were tired, or if there was a particular low-ranked fighter whom people thought was better than his spot, sometime
s people would fight below him so that they could then leapfrog him.

  In the bottom seven were people who’d already lost and were definitely going to fail out—those were assumed be less likely to fight hard, so others were more likely to challenge them.

  With this setup, as Teia explained it to Kip, if someone was ranked lower than their ability deserved, they had a chance to climb all the way to the top, if they were that good. Practically, of course, it almost never happened. Fighting was exhausting, and having to fight again immediately if you won meant it was rare that anyone jumped up the rankings very far.

  At the same time, it put tremendous pressure on those at the top not to lose even once. If they did, and the person they’d lost to also lost, they could lose numerous places by losing a single fight.

  Whoever had designed the tests wanted to get Blackguards who performed well under tremendous pressure.

  “By getting into the hierarchy higher than people think you deserve, Kip, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to get challenged a lot,” Teia said.

  Of course. If there was a safe fight in your block of three, you take that one. Kip would always be that safe fight.

  “What do I care?” Kip asked. “It’s just beatings.”

  “You know,” Teia said, “I can’t decide if you’re brave or stupid.”

  Huh?

  “If I fight you again, I’m going to win,” she said.

  “You never know,” Kip said. “I might get lucky.”

  She left. He barely noticed; he was watching the fights. Because he didn’t get any time in drafting practice, this was Kip’s first glimpse of what he assumed was normal drafting.

  But most of the Blackguard trainees were monochromes, and the odds of drawing their color on the wheel weren’t good, so most of the fights were purely hand-to-hand or weapon-to-weapon. Or sometimes the wheel would give them their color, but weakly, so instead of trying to draft a color slowly, they’d go for a straight fight. Not many of the children were able to fight effectively while also slowly drawing in enough light to be able to use it after two or three minutes of fighting. Most of the fights didn’t last that long.