The Blinding Knife

  So Kip did the smartest thing he’d done all day. He went upstairs—without making some excuse to first go into the barracks and check to see if the dagger was still in the chest five beds down. If they’d stolen it, it was already gone. If it was still there, he’d only be tipping them off. He’d come back later.

  His new room wasn’t large, but it did have a bed with new sheets and a warm blanket, a desk, a couple of chairs, and a small window to the outside. There was a lock on the door. The servant handed him a key. Nice touch.

  The people most likely to steal from him doubtless already had a copy.

  “Thank you,” Kip said. “Tell Luxlord Guile I was left speechless by his generosity. Tell him nice Scry.”

  “Nice… try, sir?”

  “Nice Scry.”

  “Scry. Very well, sir.”

  The man waited near the door, and Kip realized he was supposed to give him a tip. “I’m terribly sorry,” Kip said, “but I don’t have any money.”

  The man glanced around the room, as if to say, Awfully nice room and situation you’ve got here for a pauper. As if to say, Liar.

  Kip flushed. “Thank you, now goodbye.” He nearly slammed the door on the man’s face, suddenly angry, deeply embarrassed.

  But as the door closed, he realized that Lord Guile had done this, too. He had plenty of slaves who could have brought Kip to his new room. Slaves weren’t tipped, and the use of slaves so that your guests didn’t have to worry about tipping was a courtesy often shown between the rich. Lord Guile was reminding Kip of his poverty, of his tenuous position. Rubbing his nose in it. Reminding him how badly Kip needed Teia.

  Kip didn’t know much about the economics of it, but he did know that some drafters never pledged themselves to any satrapy, instead being supported privately. Those lords or merchants then sometimes rented out the services of their drafters to whoever needed them—mercenaries. For those who couldn’t afford the time and money it took to invest in developing a drafter, it was a bargain.

  But… Teia’s talent was worthless, wasn’t it?

  Or priceless, in the right quarters.

  Gavin, Father, would you please come back? I’m afraid I’m going to do something awful here.

  It was too late to go find Teia. She’d probably be done with her shift by now, but Kip couldn’t stay here. He wasn’t tired anyway. And he had four hours before his midnight training time with her and Ironfist.

  He left the Prism’s Tower and walked into Big Jasper. As he crossed through a market, he swore that for a few steps everyone’s gait was synchronized, one, two, three steps all simultaneous—then it passed. He must have imagined it. A few people looked at each other, then went back to their business. In half an hour, he was back in front of Janus Borig’s door. He knocked and waited patiently. He saw shadows shift on the rooftops nearby. Guards? The traps slid open, and he saw her peer out.

  “Where can I get a deck of black cards?” Kip asked.

  She laughed. “Back so soon. You see? I told you you’re smarter than you thought. Come in. Come in.”

  Chapter 51

  “You know I don’t like to start fights,” Karris said.

  Gavin froze with a bit of rabbit stew on its way to his mouth. Clearly not an opening that boded well. He made a noncommittal noise. He and Karris were eating alone tonight in their little tent not far from the beach.

  The weeks had passed in a blur of meaningful work and renewed friendship and fruitless searching and quietly growing dread. The Tyreans had landed in wonder and tears. The Third Eye’s people had provided an enormous feast—and Gavin had put the Tyreans to work immediately. Within days, he had a plan and a routine. As much as possible, he handed over power to Corvan Danavis, supporting his decisions, deferring to him publicly, and bolstering the man until the Tyreans were almost as likely to turn to Corvan to settle disputes and give guidance when Gavin was there as when he was gone.

  And Gavin was gone almost every day, scouring the seas for the blue bane with Karris. He’d sat with his abacus and his map, checked and double-checked his calculations and his assumptions—and then checked and double-checked the seas. The bane wasn’t there. Wherever the two hours east and two and a half hours south started from, it wasn’t from his beach on Seers Island. Nor, running it backward, was it simply two hours west and two and a half hours north of White Mist Reef, though that had taken him some time to figure out, too, because the reef wasn’t simply one point on the map, it was an entire zone in the sea, five times larger than Seers Island. So did he measure that distance from the presumed center of the reef, or from some particular point therein, or from every possible point in a circle?

  And it wasn’t like his skimmer’s speed was a simple constant either. Some days he was tired and he’d cover leagues less, though he thought he’d been traveling at the same rate.

  “It’s about Kip,” Karris said.

  That seemed safe enough. “Yes?” he ventured.

  “What are you doing to that boy?”

  “Pardon?” He hadn’t even seen Kip in weeks.

  “He’s a boy, Gavin.”

  “I was under the impression he was a ptarmigan.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Karris said, flushing. She shifted on her stool and winced. Training with amateurs meant collecting bruises from where people weren’t in control enough of their own bodies to pull blows short consistently.

  “I have no idea what we’re even talking about,” Gavin said.

  “You’ve given him some impossible task, haven’t you?” Karris asked.

  Gavin scowled. “How’d you know—”

  “I know you!”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Gavin said lightly, grinning, trying to defuse.

  But Karris obviously wasn’t in the mood to make peace. “He’s a boy, not a weapon. You’ve loosed him like an arrow at some target. I don’t know who. I don’t even care. You’re using him to advance some agenda.”

  Gavin absorbed that, pursed his lips, set his spoon down into his stew. “That’s right. We all serve.”

  “It’s not right. He’s a good kid, and he deserves better. You’ve acknowledged him as your son—now be a father.”

  “What? What did you just say?” Gavin demanded.

  “He’s a child! You’re treating him like he’s another soldier. He needs your time, Gavin. He needs you to put him first.”

  “I don’t put him first,” Gavin said frankly.

  “Exactly!”

  “Exactly. And what exactly would you have me abandon so I can go have playtime with Junior? Clothing and housing fifty thousand refugees? Not important. Destroying a bane? Not important. Saving all seven satrapies? Not—”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it! You’ve said Kip is your son. Are you going to treat him like he’s your son or not?”

  “Kip is not important!” Gavin shouted.

  Karris sat back, defeated. “Then you are a smaller man than I thought you were.”

  “What would you have of me?” Gavin shouted.

  “Decency,” she said quietly.

  He pounded the table with a fist so hard it bounced and spilled soup and wine everywhere. He roared, “Decency?! I do everything for others! Everything!”

  “A lie,” Karris said quietly. “But so very close to true. How is it that those closest to you get the worst of you, Gavin Guile?”

  “Out! Get out!” he roared.

  She got up and walked out. At the flap of the tent, she turned pitiless eyes on him and said, “You’re a great man, but only when seen from afar.” Then she was gone.

  What the hell was that about?

  He’d thought things were warming up with Karris as they worked together. They’d always worked well together, always enjoyed each other’s company, even when they didn’t speak. And now this. This ambush. Where had this come from?

  Women. Gavin mouthed a few more curses. He could go after her. He should go after her.

  And what? T
ell her what? Tell her the whole truth?

  The thought chilled his anger. He swore again and pulled out his charts. He had work to do, damn her.

  He’d ended up abandoning his shortcut, which had probably put him two weeks behind what a methodical approach would have yielded, and narrowed the search through guesswork and good intelligence. He’d visited cities around the Cerulean Sea, asking if people had seen blue wights, and if so, what direction they were traveling. He’d even come across wights twice, one in a sailing dinghy, the other rowing a blue luxin dory of its own design. Both had been as unhelpful as possible, of course, trying to kill Gavin and Karris, but Gavin had found where each had come from, one from a little town outside Idoss in Atash and the other from Garriston. Taking the blues’ penchant to move in efficient straight lines, he’d calculated where their paths should intersect—and found nothing there.

  Clearly, one or both of them had either been a bad sailor or had been blown off course by the autumnal storms that were all too frequent now.

  Blown off course by a storm from out of nowhere, pity the bastards. Ambushed. No wonder they say the sea is a woman.

  Gavin had ended up dividing the Cerulean Sea into zones and grids, and he would skim as far as he could, checking every half hour on his sextant and compass that he was staying on line. Of course, at the speeds he was traveling, he could have gone off course for a half hour by a few degrees—easily done during the hard weather—then corrected himself, and the next day traversed that day’s path perfectly and still have cut a wide enough berth that he would miss a small island.

  The only other option was to stop every ten minutes and take the painstaking readings. He was adept in the tools’ use, but stopping that often meant leagues and leagues that he didn’t even get to. He also had to be aware that the bane was moving. If it moved too fast, it could go straight across his grid and he’d never be the wiser—even if all of his other calculations and guesses were accurate. It was infuriating.

  Karris had suggested he build another condor and fly. It would have been a great suggestion, if he could still draft blue. It had taken him months to design the condor with the original materials, and it had still been a long way from perfect. Yellow luxin could be substituted for blue, but it was heavier, and infinitely more difficult to draft a stable version. He thought that within a couple of weeks he could figure out a design that would suffice. But made from solid yellow, it would be a permanent design. He couldn’t make a new one every day, and he couldn’t easily unravel it if he lost it to some enemy. So that meant finding a secure place to store it while he perfected it. And then, if something went wrong when he was in midair, he wouldn’t be able to simply patch it quickly with blue. If something went wrong, he would crash, and all his work would be for naught. If he knew that he was going to be searching the sea for six months, it would be worth it. But he didn’t know that.

  Beyond infuriating.

  And his Tyreans needed him. Their few drafters would burn themselves out helping with clearing forests and building shelters if Gavin didn’t lend them aid. Corvan had convinced the Seers Islanders, who were almost all drafters, to help in exchange for future work, but there was still always more work to be done. Instead of trying to do it all himself, Gavin put his copious drafting abilities to work in a way that first amused himself, and then astounded everyone else: he built bricks.

  Yellow luxin bricks. With what they’d learned building Brightwater Wall, his architects and laborers built forms for interlocking solid bricks. Gavin would walk around the forms every morning for an hour, filling them with yellow luxin, drafted perfectly, sealed perfectly, practically indestructible, and then he’d head out for the day. The laborers took the bricks and built everything out of them.

  At first content to simply guard him on the island and while they traveled, Karris had eventually begun helping out on her own. She trained the best of the locals in fighting, sometimes organizing javelina hunts. Though javelinas and the rarer giant javelinas had long been native to Tyrea, there hadn’t been any close to Garriston for decades, and facing the dangerous, unpredictable animals was the next best training to actual warfare.

  Whenever Gavin and Karris returned to the island, he was always surprised. With plentiful free building supplies and fifty thousand willing workers and friendly locals and good governance, their little port went from a camp to a settlement in quick order. There were no walls, as per Corvan’s agreement with the Third Eye, who thought that mutual vulnerability was a better guarantor of peace than mutual defensibility. But every other possible structure was springing up. Gavin felt proud to be part of building something for once.

  He spent most evenings with Corvan, talking governance, mulling over problems, making plans, even playing a game or two of Nine Kings. It was good to talk, to jest, to drink too much wine every once in a while.

  And he’d kept Karris at arm’s length, desperate for her companionship, and desperately fearful of her. Treating those closest to him worst, indeed.

  He set the charts down. He hadn’t even been looking at them for the last few minutes.

  This wasn’t about Kip, he realized. At least not purely about Kip. For Karris, this was about the path not taken. Kip was of an age where he could have been their son, had Gavin not broken his and Karris’s betrothal. Karris wasn’t saying, How can you keep your distance from a bastard you unknowingly whelped on some peasant? She was saying, Is this the kind of father you would have been to our son?

  Orholam have mercy. It was a punch in the stomach.

  And she was right.

  Kip was a good boy, but Gavin barely knew him. And he certainly didn’t know what to do with him. He should have kept him here, should have trained him himself. It hadn’t even really occurred to him. He’d seen Kip as baggage, a burden to be passed off to Commander Ironfist as quickly as possible.

  Everyone had demands of the Prism, and that had been one too many. Kip was a good boy, but he wasn’t Gavin’s son. Gavin could tell the whole world that he was; he could take the disgrace of having fathered a bastard; he could even face his own father over it. But there was a difference between a grand gesture and daily decency.

  Add Kip to the list of problems awaiting him when he got back to the Chromeria. Not waiting, festering—many of them problems that he desperately wanted to go tackle, but he felt trapped until he found the blue bane.

  The next morning, Karris greeted him as if nothing had happened, and he let it lie, too. There was nothing he could do about Kip or anything else until he found the bane.

  So he stopped whenever he saw ships out in the open sea, transformed the skimmer into a dory and rowed to them, asked his questions and deflected theirs, and kept searching. The problems elsewhere had to be growing. If he was gone too much longer, the Chromeria would declare him dead, despite the letters he sent with ship captains and the return letters from the Chromeria that he ignored. But he couldn’t leave his search. He hated blues too much. This, too, was part of his five purposes—to destroy all wights. He owed Sevastian that. Nothing would keep him from it. Not even the Chromeria itself.

  He took Karris with him almost every day, partly because she wouldn’t let him leave her, and partly because he hoped she would feel the blue. The Third Eye had let slip that everyone in the proximity of a bane would be affected, but drafters most powerfully. Gavin’s plan was to use Karris to find it, and then go back the next day without her to destroy it. She would be furious with him, of course, but he didn’t care.

  And the days passed, and passed, and passed. Two months passed. Three.

  Chapter 52

  “I can give them to you,” Janus Borig said.

  There had to be some catch, of course. No one was going to give Kip something he needed so desperately. The black cards had to be priceless.

  “But it’s going to cost me something,” Kip said. She closed the door behind him, threw many latches and bolts home.

  “No,” she said. “Free gift. Which
, come to think of it, is redundant, isn’t it?”

  “But…” he led.

  She poked his chest with the stem of her long pipe. “But do you know what it’s like to carry around an item of total wealth in your pocket? Walking down a back alley and knowing that you could buy every single house and shop on the block with what’s in your pocket? It’s terrifying. One of these cards is worth that, Kip. If I give you a deck, you’ll be carrying more than you may make in your entire life. And the wealth isn’t simply monetary. You’d be carrying history. History you could drop in a puddle and utterly ruin, or that could be quite literally stolen and gone forever. Do you have any idea how frightening that is?”

  Kip was thinking of the dagger that might or might not still be in the chest in the barracks. He swallowed. “That’s something that’s been bothering me,” he said. “Your home here. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice and all, but… it’s here. It’s not where I’d expect to find fortunes.” Which, he realized, might be the point.

  “My husband and I built this house. Nigh unto fifty years ago now. I like it here.” She shrugged. “I know it doesn’t seem like a safe place to keep what I have here, but it’s more secure than you know. I spend a fortune to make it secure. The Prism and the whole Spectrum couldn’t come take something that I didn’t want to give them.” She grinned. “Now. Now. Now. Where were—Ah. The black cards. The question is, do you want the black cards because they’re forbidden, or do you simply want to beat Andross Guile?”

  Kip scowled. It felt like the wrong answer, but he said, “I just want to beat Andross Guile.”

  “In that case, you don’t need a full deck of black cards.” She groped on the counter for a jar with more tobacco while talking.

  “I don’t?”

  “The cards weren’t outlawed because they made good game cards, Kip. They were outlawed because they told stories that the Chromeria no longer wanted told. Just as when I release the new cards—the first new cards in many, many years—they will not be popular among those they depict.”