The Blinding Knife

  He could always free her later. Or if they both became Blackguards, they would take the vows, and it would end there.

  Kip would get something for himself for once. He’d earned it. All those hours studying, memorizing decks and strategies when he could have been studying drafting instead. He’d known that he shouldn’t use the black deck trick saving Teia. He should have held on to that to save himself. He was risking his own future for her. She owed him. Without Kip, she’d belong to Andross Guile. He’d saved her from that spider. What was so wrong with wanting a little gratitude in return?

  Gratitude, huh? Is that what you’ve been fantasizing about, Kip?

  Teia set her bag down. Her voice was distant, empty. “Do you want me to wash up first? Or I could bring up hot water and we could wash together. Or… I’m sorry, Kip. I mean, my lord. I’ve never done this before. I don’t—I didn’t expect my mistress to sell me. She seemed very set—I—I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

  And he had fantasized about Teia. And felt awful afterward.

  Kip scrubbed his towel over his face. She was a slave. He hadn’t enslaved her; it was just how things were. All this wasn’t his idea, and he had to pay penalties for how things were, too. He hadn’t chosen to be a bastard, but he had to live with that, didn’t he? He took his lumps, it was only fair that he get some of the rewards. He deserved this. Besides, just because it was a duty didn’t mean it had to be unpleasant. Kip would be good to her. He would care about her. He would be better to her than any slave girl could hope a man would be.

  Teia swallowed. “I’m a virgin, but the room slaves talked about their work—a lot.” She blushed. “I think I know what to do.” She swallowed again.

  And really, what could she hope for that was better if he freed her? Did peasants have things so much better than slaves?

  Temptation is a slow and subtle serpent.

  I am the turtle-bear. I’m fat and ungainly and ridiculous, but at least I can be honest with myself. I want to take her because I’m terrified I’ll never get the chance to bed anyone ever again. And I’ll be nice to her because I don’t want to feel guilty afterward. It’s all lies.

  Of course I want to sleep with you, Master. Of course you were good to me. Of course it’s better than a girl could have ever asked for. Of course you are kind and generous and wonderful.

  If you’re not free to say no, your yes is meaningless.

  “Have I displeased you?” Teia asked.

  She wouldn’t be so attuned to my every mood and whim if I weren’t her master, would she?

  She swallowed. “We don’t need to wash up first. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry. I’m all thumbs at this. I should shut up and—” She crossed her arms and grabbed the hem of her shirt.

  Kip grabbed her arm before she could strip, stopping her. He ignored the bewildered look on her face, went to his desk, and grabbed the papers. He handed them to her, avoided her eyes.

  “You’re free. I won’t be able to get it registered until the first transfer clears the embassy—I tried, but as far as I’m concerned, you don’t belong to me.” That sounded bad, for some reason. Kip rubbed his face with the towel. “No one had slaves where I grew up, so I don’t know how people usually do this, but… I don’t want to know how it works. The idea of compelling you to… to do the things that awful old man suggested… I hate myself enough already.”

  “You haven’t been sleeping, have you?” Teia asked.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “So you haven’t.”

  Kip looked away. “I have… bad dreams.” Bad dreams. That was putting it mildly. “Whether I sleep or not, I’m more tired in the morning.”

  “Go to bed, Kip. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  “I’m serious, Teia.”

  “Me, too. To bed,” she said firmly.

  “I thought I was the master around here,” Kip said. He regretted saying it immediately, but she laughed and swatted his butt. She’d laughed a little too hard, though, obviously at least as relieved as he was.

  He went to bed and, miracle of miracles, slept.

  In the morning, Kip felt ridiculously well. For ten seconds. He caught himself humming.

  Then he thought about the dagger.

  He sponged himself clean, put on fresh clothes, and then poked his head out of his door quickly. No spies, at least none that he noticed.

  He used the stairs to go down to his old barracks level. He still didn’t have a plan, but he knew he couldn’t leave a priceless relic in some random chest forever. He slipped into the barracks and walked quickly down the rows.

  The bed under which he’d hidden the dagger had been claimed. The chest was moved to the foot of the bed, like all the other occupied beds. Kip’s throat clamped shut.

  He threw the chest open. A change of clothes, an extra blanket, a few coins. No dagger. Oh hell. Oh hell no. Dear Orholam no.

  “What are you doing in my stuff?” a voice said from the latrine doorway. It was a new boy, someone Kip had never seen before. Pimply, scrawny, birthmark on his neck.

  “I had some things in this chest,” Kip said. “Where are they? What have you done with them?”

  “What are you talking about? There was just the standard blanket when I got the chest. Are you stealing from me?”

  “Oh shut up,” Kip said.

  “You’re Breaker, aren’t you?” the boy asked.

  Great. Kip didn’t say anything. He left.

  He went downstairs and got in a student line. He was here during lectures, so the line was empty. The secretary obviously knew Kip was skipping lectures, too. He took his time coming over.

  Kip bit his tongue.

  “Are you lost, young man?” the secretary asked him. The man was holding a steaming cup of kopi.

  “No, but something of mine is. Do you have an area where you keep lost items?”

  “Indeed,” the man said. “What have you lost?”

  Kip swallowed.

  “Please don’t tell me you’ve lost a number of coins, but you can’t remember exactly how many.” The man smiled humorlessly and sipped at his kopi.

  “No. Um.” Kip lowered his voice. “A knife in a sheath, about this long, white ray skin on the um, grip, some um, glass embedded in the blade?”

  “You boys and your games.”

  “I’m serious.”

  The man took another sip of his kopi, rolled his eyes, and went to a box behind his desk. He began rummaging through old cloaks and trousers. “Slaves clean the rooms, you know. Shifty lot. No morals. Thieves half the time. You really shouldn’t leave anything out that—” He stopped speaking.

  Kip heard the unmistakable sound of a blade sliding out of its sheath. His heart leapt.

  The man came back to the counter and laid the blade on the counter. It was the real thing. His eyes were wide.

  Kip swept it off the counter. “It might, uh, be wiser for you to not tell anyone about this,” he said. “Um, I didn’t mean that to sound like a threat. I meant it’s kind of incredibly important, so if anyone else comes looking for it, maybe you haven’t ever seen it and don’t know what they’re talking about? And if you ever find out which slave brought it here, tell them thanks. I probably owe them my life or something.”

  The man sipped his kopi nonchalantly. There were beads of sweat on his forehead, though.

  I don’t have anywhere to conceal a big knife.

  As if it weren’t terribly conspicuous, Kip took the knife and stuck it up his sleeve, the hilt concealed as much as possible in his hand. He swallowed and tightened his belt with one hand.

  Girding up my loins, I guess.

  Loins. Kip didn’t like the word.

  The secretary cleared his throat. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked.

  Oh, Kip was stalling.

  “No. Thanks again.” Then he was off.

  He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t have any safe place to put
something worth a fortune, but he found himself walking toward Janus Borig’s house. She had things that were worth a fortune, hidden in plain sight. Maybe she could give him some advice.

  When he got to the entry hall, he realized that everyone coming inside was soaking wet. He thought about going back up to his room and getting a cloak, but his room could well have a spy on it, and he already was doing a bad job of protecting the dagger. Getting lucky once was great, but expecting it to happen again was too much.

  He’d just have to get wet. Orholam knew he had enough insulation to keep warm. He braced himself against the downpour and started jogging.

  When he reached Janus Borig’s house, sopping wet and freezing cold, he found the door bashed in, torn off its hinges, the iron twisted and ripped. He smelled something in the air. Blood. Blood and smoke.

  Chapter 61

  Kip could feel fear trying to paralyze him, but fear was slow. Fear could only perch on his shoulders and spread its black wings over his face if he gave it a place to roost. It flew around his head, stabbing its bloody beak for his eyes, but Kip was faster. He burst inside.

  He ran into something as he stepped through the torn door. Something yielding and invisible. Not something. Someone.

  Kip’s weight did something useful for once, and he fell forward, staggering into Janus Borig’s house and knocking over the invisible figure. He saw the flash of a trouser leg through an open cloak, as the man tumbled over a shattered bookshelf.

  There was a small explosion of cards. The man must have had his hands full of them, and as he hit the ground, they went everywhere.

  Then, in a rustle of cloth, he disappeared.

  Kip jumped to his feet, slipped on the trash on the floor, and saw dead bodies. Armed men, perhaps half a dozen, all uniformed in black with a silver shield embroidered on their chests. Janus Borig’s guards. All the dead were her guards. They hadn’t killed anyone in return.

  The sound of steel being drawn cut through the muted hiss of the rain and wind outside.

  Kip widened his eyes to the sub-red spectrum—and the invisible man snapped into focus. Cloaked but still radiating more heat than his surroundings. He was walking straight toward Kip, not bothering to lower his own center of gravity. Kip must look like easy meat.

  Looking around frantically like he had no idea what was going on, Kip waited until the cloaked man stepped closer. Apparently the cloak only concealed what was beneath it, so the man had only a short sword, and he couldn’t lift it until the last second or it would be revealed, hanging in midair. So the man walked forward, sword point down.

  When the man was within two paces, Kip screamed. He leapt toward the man and to the side, left arm sweeping in a block that batted the man’s sword arm even as it came up, and his right hand burying his own dagger in the man’s chest.

  Sub-red was bad for making out detail, or Kip was just clumsy, because his feet landed on books and apple cores and flew out from under him. He lost his dagger.

  He popped back up to his feet, the battle rush making him shake. The invisible man was now very much visible, flopped on his back, arms wide, unmoving, Kip’s dagger staked straight through his chest.

  Kip looked around frantically. Janus had had a thousand muskets in here. Why couldn’t he find any of them now? Nothing seemed to be on fire now, though the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. He also smelled the resinous, fresh cedar smell of green luxin. They’d smothered fires with luxin. Fires. Janus Borig had said she’d booby-trapped the cards upstairs. Maybe she’d laid traps down here, too.

  “Vox?!” a woman’s voice shouted from upstairs. “What was that?”

  Snatching up his dagger from the dead man, Kip charged up the steps, as stealthy as a rhinoceros falling onto a crate of porcelain. The woman was standing at the wall of cards, pulling them down, sticking them into a wooden case with dividers, but she was already looking alarmed when Kip came into her view. She dropped the case onto a table and pulled her cloak around herself.

  Without noticing, Kip had let his eyes go back to normal vision, and he saw the briefest glimpse of the upper room. Janus Borig lay in a bloody heap by her desk, dead. One smooth section of the wall had been broken open, revealing a hiding place that must have held cards or other treasures, and half the wall was bare.

  The shimmer came toward him, and he relaxed his eyes. The invisible woman became a warm glow, coming fast toward him, raising her short sword at the last second. These assassins must be used to easy kills, because when Kip dodged, she was so surprised she didn’t even try to adjust. He spun as he jumped past her and lashed out.

  His dagger brushed something and then pulled through. Kip thought—hoped—that it was the side of her neck. He crouched low, out in the middle of the room.

  “You’re a sub-red,” she said. “Always hated sub-reds.” She shimmered back into visibility. She was a petite woman, blonde hair and pale skin, blue eyes made mostly green by drafting. Eyes narrow, face like a ferret. Her hair was pulled back into two braids. One of them had been cut halfway through by Kip’s dagger. She drew a pistol.

  Kip snatched up Janus’s little chair and threw it at the assassin. She jumped aside, but had already pulled her trigger. The gun roared, its sound amplified in the small room. A series of loud whines, one on top of the other, rang out as the lead ball ricocheted off the walls.

  The woman cursed and grabbed her leg, either hit by the bullet or faking it. Kip had no idea how badly it had wounded her. She threw the pistol at him, missed, and then attacked him with the short sword.

  Her blade wasn’t a fencing weapon by any means. Short and broad, it was meant for stabbing the unsuspecting, and making sure that single stab was lethal. Kip’s blade was almost the same length, but narrower, sharper, and held by a much worse fighter and a much bigger target.

  But the woman was hurt. Kip got into a knife fighting stance, trying to remember everything his trainers had ever said. The assassin might be feigning that her injury was worse than it was to lure Kip into doing something stupid.

  Patience. If she was hurt, she’d do something reckless to try to end the fight quickly.

  “People will be here any second,” Kip said. “You might as well—”

  She lunged at him and he batted her short sword aside and punched her in the face with his ruined left hand. At least it made a good fist—and good contact. She staggered back, wobbling a bit on her injured left leg.

  If he’d followed hard after that strike, he could have ended the fight there, but he was tentative, worried she was tricking him.

  She recovered, nose streaming blood, weaving. Maybe exaggerating the weaving a little.

  “Every guard captain in five blocks has been bribed,” she said. “And you hear that?”

  Kip wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Oh, the thunder.

  “That means no one who’s heard the shots will think anything of it. You’re going to die here, fire boy.”

  “Why’d you do it?” Kip asked. Stalling. He could see a bloodstain spreading on her dark trousers. The ricochet had hit her.

  There is no cheating in war; there are only survivors and victims. Trainer Fisk had pounded those lessons into his class. Blackguards weren’t taught to duel; they were taught to kill.

  Kip was no knife fighter, but he was stronger than this woman, especially as the blood loss weakened her. Their slow circling had brought him back within reach of the stool.

  “Orders,” she said. “And who the hell are you, so I can report who we killed?”

  “Kip Guile,” he said.

  “Guile?”

  Kip hurled his knife at the woman. It was never a good idea to throw your knife, unless you know how to throw knives. Kip didn’t. But she wasn’t expecting it—and it hit her, right in her chest. Hilt first.

  But she jumped back, cursing, and Kip grabbed the stool, swinging it with both hands in a great arc.

  The assassin tried to move back farther, but she was right against the wall, th
ere was nowhere to go. Kip connected solidly, all of his strength in the blow. She tried to block it, but he crushed through her defense, breaking one leg of the stool, leaving it an awkward weapon.

  But he didn’t repeat his earlier mistake; this time he followed up his attack. The room was brighter than it had been earlier, and he could see that the assassin’s arm was obviously broken, but she still somehow held on to her knife. She was reaching over to grab it with her left hand when Kip crashed into her, smashing her against the wall with his lowered shoulder.

  He heard the whoosh of her breath being crushed out of her, and then they were both scrambling for her dagger.

  “Niah!” A voice cried out from the stairs. “Get down!”

  Kip turned to see the other assassin—the one he swore he’d killed—standing there, pistol leveled. The assassin, Niah, tried to wriggle away from Kip and dive to the floor, but he held her, absorbed by the tiny orange dot hovering above the man’s pistol—a burning slow match. It slapped down into the pan.

  Kip spun with Niah, face-to-face, abandoning all thought of the dagger between them.

  A boom, and she snapped her head forward into his face. Her headbutt caught him in the nose and lip. His eyes instantly flooded with tears.

  “Niah!”

  Kip stumbled backward, tripped, fell on his ass. The assassin Niah dropped like a pile of meat, the back of her skull exploded. What Kip had thought was a headbutt was her brained skull snapping forward into him from absorbing a bullet.

  He smacked his head on the wall as he fell, not so hard that it dazed him, but it still hurt.

  I’m a moron. He reached into a pocket and snatched out his green spectacles.

  The other assassin, Vox, was staring in horror at the shattered head of his partner, whom he’d just killed. But Kip’s movement made him spring into action, leaping forward and kicking Kip in the head.

  Kip’s shoulder took most of the blow, and he rolled with the kick, putting as much distance between himself and Vox as he could. He saw the assassin snatching up Niah’s short sword. Kip staggered to his feet, unarmed, trapped in a corner of the room, just as Vox settled into a fighting stance. From the stance alone, Kip could tell he was a warrior.