The Blinding Knife

  “I’m sorry, but, the old gods? Like Atirat and Anat and Dagnu?”

  Again, a flash of irritation, and Liv felt stupid. But he spoke with kindness. “You know how you feel when you draft superviolet?”

  “Of course. Alien, separated from emotion, and honestly a little proud of how clearly I see things.”

  “That isn’t you,” Zymun said.

  “I’m not a terribly conceited person, I’ll agree,” Liv said. But you don’t know me, so how would you know?

  “I don’t mean that isn’t the ‘real you.’ I mean, that isn’t you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Those aren’t your feelings. Those aren’t your perceptions. Indeed, those aren’t your abilities. Ferrilux is invisible. He is behind many of man’s greatest achievements, but he doesn’t think much of most men. He is distant and disdainful, and he has chosen to share his powers with you.”

  The idea seemed repugnant to Liv. “There’s an invisible man helping me draft? This is what the Color Prince believes? My drafting’s mine.”

  Zymun’s voice was cold, affect flat. “So you chose your colors? Superviolet, for an outsider, for the Tyrean girl who could never be part of the Chromeria, but who secretly despised the girls who would never let her join their petty circles. Yellow, for a clear thinker who couldn’t decide whether or not to engage with all she saw around her. Hmm, sounds very, what’s the word? Serendipitous.”

  “You’re talking like a tenpenny soothsayer. If I’d been a sub-red, you’d say, oh, sub-red, for the girl so furious at being made an outsider. Or blue, oh, you envied the girls who did belong. Garbage.” Liv folded her hands, took a breath, and squeezed her fingers against each other. “I mean… your pardon, my lord, but I’m not convinced. I know the Chromeria taught lies, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to accept the first counterargument that comes along.”

  Zymun didn’t seem to take it personally. “You’re cute when you’re mad. And when you do that with your arms, it shows off your bosom nicely.”

  Liv looked down and dropped her clenched hands like she’d been burned. “Excuse me?!” She stopped walking and he stopped, too, facing her. She almost slapped his silly face. “That is the most inappropriate thing anyone has ever said to me. And I expect your apology right this instant!”

  “Inappropriate? Why? Who says? You’re beautiful. I told you so. Who gets to decide that I can’t tell you what I think? I’d tell you, but you’re smart enough to already know. You’ve joined the Free, Aliviana. We decide for ourselves, and there’s power in that. The Chromeria wants you to be modest. Why? If Orholam existed, why would he care how tight your dress is or who comes to your bed? Should have bigger problems to tackle, you’d think, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well…” But Liv didn’t have anything to follow that monosyllable.

  “The Chromeria teaches you to hate the very things about yourself that make you strong. You’re beautiful. Use that. Use it however you wish. Don’t you see? You choose. Now, you could choose to become a prostitute—no, don’t take offense, dammit, it’s a hypothetical! You could do very well, no doubt, and it wouldn’t be wrong because Orholam says it’s wrong: it’s not wrong at all. It’s just stupid. It’s a poor use of all your gifts, and it limits your other choices, at least until the world changes. So it’s a bad choice, but not a wrong one. That’s how we draft, too. Some people break the halo before they’re ready, choosing to share their body permanently before they can survive the union with their minds intact. They use their choice in a way that takes away their choice, like choosing suicide. It’s a stupid action and it demeans them as moral agents. What we have here—the Free—what we offer, is a free-for-all. But it’s not chaos. Free choices, freely made, but still with consequences. You choose to join the army, you have to obey orders until your time of service is ended. This is a harder world than what you left, Liv. Freedom is hard. If you don’t want me to compliment you because someone told you that you shouldn’t be proud of your beautiful curves, your full lips, your radiant skin, the graceful lines of your neck, your bright eyes, that’s ridiculous. To hell with them. If you don’t want to bed me because you don’t like me, that’s altogether different.” He was terribly smart, wasn’t he? And supremely willful. Powerful.

  She pushed down a sudden surge of admiration, and a deep and silly pleasure at his outrageous flattery. She’d never been called beautiful at the Chromeria. Tyreans couldn’t be beautiful, couldn’t be fashionable, not after the False Prism’s War. “You’re used to getting your way, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Hazard of being handsome and brilliant.”

  She sniffed. “So is getting punched in the nose.”

  He raised his hands and stepped back. “I didn’t say I was brave, too.” He offered her his arm, and she took it, not able to stop a grin from sneaking through her defenses. “Mm. Oh, just thought of something. Who was the Color Prince? Before he got burned?”

  “Koios White Oak. Why?”

  “Just curious.” Karris’s brother?

  “No secret. What you were is less important to us than what you are, and what you will become. Now, you get to work on drafting. You have a lot to unlearn, and more to learn.”

  “I’m still not going to bed with you,” she said.

  “We’ll work on that,” he said with a wink and a big grin.

  And with that, Liv’s education began.

  Chapter 39

  When Kip shuffled out of the library at midnight, Ironfist was waiting for him at the lift. The huge commander said nothing, but gestured to him.

  Kip was instantly alert. Hungry, but alert. He was surprised to see that Adrasteia was with the commander. They stepped into the lift together, and Commander Ironfist pushed a key into a lock, and took them to a lower level in the Chromeria than Kip had ever been to. He looked at Teia. She looked back, shrugged.

  The commander poked his head into a dark hallway. He walked through the darkness. Kip opened his eyes wide, wider, to the sub-red spectrum. Ironfist radiated enough heat, his whole body gray, armpits and groin lighter, and his bare, uncovered head the brightest of all. He went down the hall.

  “Kip,” Teia said. Her voice was tight. He couldn’t quite read her expression: sub-red light was inexact and Kip wasn’t practiced with it, but he could tell she was nervous. Surely not scared of the dark. Not Teia.

  But of course she was. Almost all drafters were afraid of the dark—even lots of sub-reds were. Light was Orholam’s gift; darkness was akin to evil; blindness was powerlessness. Her hands were out, and Kip took one. He led her down the hall. Ironfist didn’t slow.

  Then Kip realized he was holding hands with Teia, and abruptly felt awkward. He sort of spasmed. She couldn’t miss it.

  “Uhm,” he said. “Uh.” He put her hand on his arm instead.

  Oh, like a lord leading his lady to a dinner party. Much better. Moron!

  Kip cleared his throat, but then thought that anything he said would be equally stupid. He scowled and shot a look at her.

  She was smirking.

  Though of course it was dark so she didn’t know he could see her smirking, he still wanted to die.

  She said, “I’m… I’m better now.” Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips, an odd, hot point in the cool, dark hall. “I… have some trouble relaxing my eyes sometimes.”

  Oh, that was right. She could see sub-red. Her color was down farther on the spectrum that way. She would have gotten it on her own. She took her arm back, awkwardly.

  Kip squared his shoulders, put his head down, and followed Ironfist down the halls. It was only a couple of turns before Ironfist took them into a room. He manipulated some mechanism Kip probably wouldn’t have understood even if he’d been able to see it in visible light, and the ceiling began glowing, a warm radiant soft white.

  It was a training room, but not like any Kip had ever seen.

  Ironfist began rummaging in a corner while Kip and Teia looked around. There were beams for prac
ticing balance, bars for doing pull-ups, punching dummies coated with luxin that would light up in various zones to train quickness, punching bags of sawdust and leather, wooden blocking trees, a pile of cushioned body armor for sparring, terry cloths, targets, and padded weapons of every sort.

  “This is the Prism’s training room. He allows us to share it,” Ironfist said. He had long strips of cloth in each hand. “Give me your hands, Kip. Straight as you can, and firm.”

  Kip gave him his hands, and Ironfist began wrapping a strip of cloth around his wrist.

  “It’s time for you two to learn something,” Ironfist said.

  “What’s that, sir?” Adrasteia asked.

  “There are three scrubs I absolutely can’t let fail.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Kip, because his father asked me not to.”

  Teia looked over at him, obviously not happy with the injustice of that. Kip blushed, then scowled.

  Ironfist continued: “Cruxer, because he’s got the potential to be the best Blackguard in a generation.”

  “How would he fail out? He’s the best of us by far,” Teia said.

  “Only through bad luck. But it could happen. Could, but I won’t let it. And the third is you, Teia.”

  “Me?” she asked. She sounded genuinely shocked.

  “Your color,” Commander Ironfist said. “You can see through cloth, which means you can see concealed weapons. In a normal year, I could take you even if you had no legs. Your peers would be angry, but in the fullness of time they’d realize you’re worth any five of them, even if you couldn’t fight at all. I can’t do that, not this year. If I pass you on and you’re terrible, it’ll be another blow to the Blackguards’ confidence. It’s important that we know we’re elite. If I’m seen adding obvious mediocrities to our ranks, it hurts everyone. Thus, a bastard and an outer-spectrum girl have to look as good as everyone else. Teia, you’ve been hiding how good you are, but without drafting, you’ll have to get lucky to make it at your current skill level, and Kip’s a year behind the top students. So you both get extra practice, and less sleep.”

  He finished wrapping Kip’s hands, scowling and being careful with the left, then helped Kip pull gloves on.

  Under Ironfist’s watchful eye, Kip started punching one of the sawdust bags. They’d trained punching forms in their lines during practice, but full contact was different.

  “Not so hard, not yet,” Ironfist said.

  Kip got back to hitting the bag, quick but not hard. It hurt his left hand. But mostly keeping his left in a fist wasn’t hard. It was straightening it that sent tears down his face. Ironfist set Teia to doing push-ups, with claps in between. Teia was tiny, so she didn’t have that much body to throw into the air, but even then she quickly tired. Ironfist had her continue doing it from her knees.

  After they got going, Ironfist wrapped his own hands and stepped up to the bag next to Kip’s and started working out himself.

  Kip’s hands hurt, but after ten minutes or so, they simply felt warm. He wondered if they were bleeding under the wrappings. Ironfist simply let him know that he could start hitting harder. He thought about Liv. He thought about his mother. He thought about the Prism.

  And somehow, though his thoughts took him nowhere and he discovered nothing new, he felt better after beating the hell out of an inanimate object. But Ironfist kept going, and going. Kip followed. After an hour, Kip was the walking dead. Ironfist threw him a towel and said, “Kip, go to the lift. We’ll be along in a minute.”

  Kip left. The temptation to eavesdrop was strong, but the idea of facing Ironfist’s wrath was daunting. Plus, it just seemed disrespectful. He walked toward the lift, wiping sweat away with the towel.

  He was hungry. It seemed like he was always hungry here. The glims, or second-year, and above students had lounges that were reputed to serve food for longer hours—or for the gleams and beams, the third- and fourth-year students, all day and night. But first-year students weren’t allowed. You had to earn everything here, from library access to food.

  Kip coughed, and in his sub-red vision the spray shot out in a cloud of little white and red dots.

  He raised his hand, and he was in Garriston, covered in green luxin, the smell of gunpowder and blood and luxin and sweat and fear heavy in his nostrils. He held up his hand and shot out bullets at the soldiers massed around him. A man’s cheek was blown off, head jerking around and then twisting back toward Kip, flinging teeth and blood droplets, the man staggering into him.

  Kip put his hand on the man’s forehead, as if blessing him. And shot a bullet into his brain, gore blasting back into his open palm.

  He was pure will, and those who opposed him were nothing but chaff on a breeze blown about a titan’s knees.

  And then he was back, blinking, shivering.

  It was like all this was so thin, so fragile. A lie. Kip was worrying about passing some test? About what fifteen-year-old children thought about him? Death was huge, towering, indomitable, victorious everywhere. One tiny lead ball away. A sliver of luxin, and all this was exposed as frippery and folly.

  He barely had time to dab away the tears from his eyes—he wasn’t crying, why were there tears?—before Ironfist and Teia came down the hall.

  Ironfist glanced at Kip but said nothing. They got on the lift. Kip wanted to ask him something, but he couldn’t even put it into words. How did Ironfist do it? How did he kill people, and come back, still himself? How did he straddle the worlds? Ironfist was a rock, unperturbed, solid, an island in a sea of madness.

  Commander Ironfist ran his hand over his shaven, bare head. His voice came out low, gravelly. “While my mother bled out her life from that assassin’s blade, I held her, Kip. I prayed. Prayed as I never had before, or since. Orholam didn’t hear me. I believed I wasn’t worthy of his gaze, that he sees only the good and great.” His face twisted for a half second in some emotion, quickly suppressed. Grief? Desolation? But his voice was level. “Kip, the world doesn’t explain itself. You go on.”

  “How?” Kip’s voice sounded small and hollow in his own ears.

  “You just do.”

  Kip looked at the commander. That was it? The answer was no answer? He felt his heart drop.

  Teia looked from one to the other, mystified, but said nothing, asked nothing. Kip wished he could thank her for that.

  The lift came to a stop at their floor.

  Ironfist handed Teia the key. His voice was gruff, but not yet back to its old timbre. “Every night. I won’t always be able to make it, but I’ll be there as often as I can. Kip, I’ve heard you’ve been barred from practicum, and Teia, you need to work on your abilities, too, even though I can’t help you much with your type of drafting. Tomorrow you both start practicing magic.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kip and Adrasteia went their separate ways, not sure what to say to each other. Kip washed up and went to bed. His body ached; his mind was numb, crying out for sleep, but every time he closed his eyes he saw blood, brains, the bullet blessing.

  Dawn was a relief of the only kind he now knew: a move from one kind of fight to another. He got up to fill another day. If he was busy enough, he wouldn’t have time to think.

  Chapter 40

  “She’s a beautiful woman,” Karris said.

  Gavin said nothing. They were hiking back through the jungle to their own camp. This was the first thing Karris had said since exclaiming over the blue snow—which Gavin had claimed to know nothing about.

  “She likes you,” Karris said.

  Gavin said nothing.

  “You can spend the night with her, you know,” Karris said.

  Now she was starting to infuriate him.

  “You’ve been edgy,” Karris said. “Maybe it’ll help calm you down if you go get it out of your system.”

  Gavin stopped. “You’re saying this to me. Really. You?”

  Karris gave a tiny shrug. “What I asked earlier… it wasn’t fair. I’ve got no c
laim on you. You and I don’t have anything that should keep you from… cavorting as you please. You’re the Prism, there ought to be some benefits, right?”

  “Please don’t say stupid things to me, Karris.” Cavorting?

  “I was just—”

  “I’ve made my decision.” And it’s you.

  “And I’m telling you—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Usually, that would have made her explode. This time, she said nothing. They walked in silence. Made camp in silence. Slept in silence.

  Somehow, he did sleep, but he dreamed of colored hells and his brothers. The dread inside him kept that sleep from leaving him rested. By the time Karris woke him for his watch, hours before dawn, the snow was gone. While Karris slept, Gavin sat up. For some reason, he was haunted by his dead little brother Sevastian. Little Sevastian, the good-hearted brother. The peacemaker between his constantly feuding older siblings.

  Who would Sevastian have sided with in the Prisms’ War?

  In this insane world where Gavin was supposed to have some sort of holy link directly to a deity who didn’t exist or didn’t care, instead, he cared only about what his dead little brother would have thought of him. Who would you have been, Sevastian? Could I have killed Gavin and then handed over the reins to you and the world now know peace? What sort of world would this be, if that damned wight hadn’t murdered you?

  A blue wight, too. What did that mean? The very color Gavin had lost control of now was the color that had murdered Sevastian. It was the very color that Dazen had broken out of. Coincidence?

  Yes, Gavin, that’s what a coincidence is.

  The sun rose, but there was only darkness in Gavin’s heart.

  Chapter 41

  Dazen Guile stared at the dead man in the wall of the green prison. He and the dead man were picking scabs from their knees. They’d been in the green hell for days, a week? Surely not two weeks yet. They’d been quietly falling unconscious for unknown periods, quietly licking water off the wall, quietly starving. Maybe two weeks, from the scabs.