The Blinding Knife

  “Hanishu and his fifty were alerted by some refugees, and they came back to the city as fast as they could. The Tiru had already set up camp in the palace, feasting around the still-unburied bodies of those they’d massacred. My brother and his soldiers arrived in the middle of the night. The Tiru were scattered, sleeping, or drunk, and my brother fell on them like a lion. He was eighteen years old, and he already had two daughters and a son. He found his wife’s and children’s bodies. The Tiru had done… unspeakable things to them. My brother went mad. A warrior in his prime and a wild drafter.

  “The Tiru panicked, attacked each other, and my brother slaughtered all those he found. They said that he fought like a god, like Anat had possessed him. He killed through the dawn. The people of Aghbalu rallied around him then, and they rounded up the Tiru tribesmen, the old men and the young, the traders and camp followers and the wives and the shepherds… and…” He swallowed. “And Hanishu slaughtered them all. Personally. The Tiru numbered two thousand families, and the Tiru are no more.” He handed Kip the card. “Beware of what memories you choose to watch, Kip. You may carry what you find forever.”

  Kip knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t help it. “What if the truth in that card is different than what you were told?”

  The big commander turned mournful eyes on Kip. “I don’t think it would matter. I lost most of the people I cared about, and I lost my brother. Hanishu is no more. He was broken by what he did. Still a peerless warrior, but he doesn’t trust himself anymore. He can’t lead. He’s not even a watch captain. Can’t bear the weight of responsibility. Every time I go back into a fight with him, I lose him for weeks afterward.” He ran a hand over his shaven, bare head. “I’m afraid I’ve eaten too much truth recently. So this is what you came to speak to me about?”

  “Will you swear not to tell anyone else?” Kip asked.

  “You can’t ask me that, Kip. I need to do what I think is right.”

  “I’m asking,” Kip said. “If you won’t promise, I can’t tell you everything.”

  Commander Ironfist heaved a deep breath. “You’re as bad as any Guile, you know that?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Commander Ironfist stared at the floor for a while. “I don’t know why you drag us in your wake. Even a child of the Guiles is pulling me along like a leaf in a gale.” He shook his head, and there was bitterness in his sad eyes. “Very well, you have my word.”

  “Janus Borig made the cards. I was down at her house—”

  “Janus Borig? She’s a myth, Kip. The old Witch of Wind Palace?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kip said. “She’s just an old lady with a little shop.”

  “A shop?”

  “On Big Jasper.” Kip looked at him, confused.

  “You found a True Mirror, hiding in plain sight. You’ve been in this city two months? How’d you find her?”

  “The librarian told me—”

  “Which librarian?”

  “Rea. Rea Siluz.”

  “Hmm. I’ll check into that. But never mind that for now. Tell me.”

  “I went to Janus Borig’s house tonight. She was murdered. By a man and a woman wearing those cloaks. Shimmercloaks. Made them mostly invisible, except in the sub-red and superviolet.”

  For a moment, Ironfist’s face twisted like Kip was a little boy telling the most outlandish lies. Then he looked at the cloaks.

  “Show me one of those cards.”

  “Which one do you—”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Kip pulled out a card at random and Ironfist drafted a sliver of blue and touched the card for an instant, then snatched back his finger.

  “Another,” he said.

  Kip extended one, fanning out the cards, but Ironfist chose another. He drafted, touched it, and pulled his finger back as if burned.

  “My apologies, I had to know for myself. They’re real. They’re all real. Tell me everything, Kip.”

  So Kip did. It was like an enormous burden being lifted from his shoulders. Abruptly, he felt like he was a child again—except it felt good. There were things in the world too big for him to deal with by himself, and trusting Ironfist felt really good. “So what’s it all mean?” he asked.

  “I thought war was coming, but I was wrong,” Commander Ironfist said. “War is already here. And you’re in tremendous danger, and so am I.”

  It seemed like as much of a global summary statement as Kip had ever heard, and he felt totally inappropriate when he said, “Oh, um. There’s one more thing.”

  “Found some other artifact of world-altering power to go with two shimmercloaks and an entire set of original, new Nine Kings cards?” Commander Ironfist asked archly.

  Kip’s mouth worked.

  “It was a joke, Kip.”

  Kip pulled out the dagger slowly and laid it across his palms. It was longer. He was sure of it now. The white seemed whiter, the black whorls seemed blacker. There was also another difference: of the seven diamonds embedded in the blade, one burned bright blue as it had since Kip had recovered it from Zymun, but now a second was lit from within, too. It was a dull green.

  Swallowing, Kip looked up at Commander Ironfist.

  Chapter 67

  Dazen Guile was trembling, shivering. His eyes were dry, scratchy from not blinking enough.

  He was in a race against his own mortality and a timer with some uncertain amount of sand in it. He’d recovered from his fever, but was still deathly weakened from it. His body, struggling to heal itself from the fever and from the dozens of cuts he’d sustained in crawling through the hellstone tunnel, was desperate and weak. Gavin’s fool lackey kept dropping the blue bread down the tube. The more of it Dazen didn’t eat, the better his source of blue and the faster he could draft. But the more he starved himself, the weaker he became.

  And the bread only lasted so long. Once a week—assuming, always assuming that Gavin had arranged for him to be fed once per day, rather than some odd fraction thereof—once a week, the cell was flooded with water.

  At first, so many years ago, Dazen had thought this was a mercy. The water was soapy, warm. He could regain a modicum of cleanliness once a week. If he tried, he could comb the tangles out of his hair and beard. And then he’d tried saving his bread once—and saw the water bleached it, or stained it a dull gray. A blue-gray, it had been in the blue cell, of course, reflecting the blue light of the walls.

  It had been a mercy. It had been Gavin’s way of keeping his brother from getting some disease that fed on the muck and filth his own body produced. It had also been Gavin’s way of making sure that whatever Dazen might have hidden away in a week, from his own body’s effluents or from his food, would be washed away, leached of power.

  Dazen had needed to swim before he’d broken out of the blue cell, holding the oily cloth he’d woven from his own hair out of the water several times when the torrent had come, and now, in this cell, the bleaching water threatened again. He was too weak to do more than float and save perhaps one blue loaf, so every week he would starve himself for the first couple of days and start drafting again, and his drafting would speed up as the week progressed. Then he would devour all the stale bread his belly could hold before the flood came to wash all away again.

  My will is indomitable. Unshakable. Titanic. I cannot be opposed. I cannot be stopped. I will win. There is only winning. And I will crush my brother. This is the fire, this is the fuel, this is the hope that sustains my broken body.

  Blue was harder than green. Blue was all Dazen needed to break out of this level of hell.

  In another hour, Dazen’s right arm was full. He scooted over to his seat against one wall. He nestled his back firmly against the green luxin and braced himself. For weeks now—months?—he had been shooting out blue projectiles at the highest speed his body could handle, and bracing himself against the wall kept him from being flung about and destroyed.

  The green luxin wall
opposite him was pitted and chipped to a depth of a hand. It had infuriated him at first. His brother had made the blue chamber thinner, and the blue drafter in Dazen had expected every chamber to have exactly the same dimensions. But his brother knew that green was weaker than blue, so of course he’d made the green walls thicker. It was logical. The blue in him had calmed.

  He picked his targets with arithmetic precision to exploit the structural properties of green luxin. He didn’t know, of course, if he’d picked the correct wall. The ball shape of his chamber prohibited that. If his brother had irrationally made one wall thicker than the others, Dazen might simply get unlucky and pick the thickest wall.

  That infuriated him. The uncertainty of it. The imprecision. It was wrong. He’d wasted at least a day in a weak stupor trying to figure out if there was some way to tell which wall was the right one. Hours wasted in calculation when action was required.

  It was a warning sign of how deep the blue had sunk into him.

  But he’d overcome that, as he’d overcome every struggle. As he would overcome even his brother.

  He breathed deeply, ten breaths, gathering his will. Every projectile he fired hurt him, crushed his weakened body against the wall. But Dazen couldn’t yield, couldn’t shoot weakly. Shooting weakly meant that he’d wasted the days it took to draft the blue he needed. The wall could give anytime. It could give to this very shot.

  Or, of course, it could take another twenty, and at any time, Gavin could come back and—

  No! Don’t think it. Do this. Pain is nothing. Pain is an obstacle on the road to freedom. I cannot be stopped. I will not be stopped. I will have my vengeance and my freedom, and those who have done this will tremble.

  He took the tenth breath, braced his right arm with his left, and gathered his power. Old scars ripped open on his palm as the blue luxin tore through his skin.

  Dazen screamed rage and despair and hatred and pure, glorious will. A missile burst from him with incredible power.

  During the False Prism’s War, he’d been hit in the chest with a war hammer once. It had cracked his shield and a rib. With his weakened body, this was worse. He passed out.

  But when he opened his eyes, he saw his victory. The green luxin was broken. A few fibrous tendrils held on, but it was broken. He could see darkness beyond. His prison was broken.

  With a calm willpower that would have stunned a younger version of himself, he drank some water, ate a little of the bread. Not so much that his long-empty stomach would revolt.

  Then, only then, did he draft a tiny thread of green. It was light, it was life, it was power and connectedness and well-being and strength.

  Only then did he allow himself a moment of triumph. He had done it. He had done it. He really was unstoppable. He was a god.

  He stood, grinning, legs trembling, but strong enough to allow him to stand, and tottered over to the hole. He tore away the green luxin with his bare hands, opened the hole enough to peer through. To crawl through, once he gained a little more strength.

  Poking his head through the hole, he drafted some green imperfectly into his hand, bathing the darkness in weak green light. The green egg in which he’d been imprisoned was, it appeared, contained within a greater chamber, only a little larger than the egg itself. It wouldn’t have mattered which wall Dazen broke through. All of them were equal.

  For one stupid moment, he was furious at the time he’d wasted, wondering which side to attack. But then that passed. That day of vacillation was gone, it couldn’t be called back, and it was illogical to fret over it, to waste more of the present on the past. He pushed it away, and his smile came back.

  To one side of the chamber, he saw a tunnel, floor glittering with sharp shards of hellstone.

  Dazen laughed, low, quiet. It was a laugh at finally, finally being underestimated.

  No, brother, that won’t work. Not this time.

  Chapter 68

  “Corvan, am I a good man?” Gavin asked.

  “You’re a great man, my friend.”

  “Not the same, are they?” Gavin asked. There had been blood in his dreams, blood staining the water from the blue he couldn’t see to the red he most certainly could. Red on gray. In his incipient blindness, he’d traded blue beauty for blood, all unwillingly.

  Corvan said, “When you move the world, some will be crushed. How could it be else? When you sank the pirates at Tranquil Point, the slaves chained to the oars died first. What else were you to do? Leave the pirates to capture and make slaves of thousands more? But that’s not what I meant, my lord. You are a great man.”

  Gavin chewed on that, put it in the hold of his memory. “And you, Corvan? What kind of man are you?”

  “I am simply competent. A red by training but not by nature. Not a leader except when leadership is lacking. But you know these things better than anyone.” A quizzical, amused expression.

  Not a leader except when leadership is lacking? It was true: Corvan had proven himself to be perfectly content to take orders—even orders he didn’t understand—from those who had won his trust. Then, without changing his nature, he’d assumed command of entire armies. He knew what needed to be done, and did it, somehow without it changing his appraisal of himself. He probably really had been content as a small-town dyer.

  Gavin wondered how Corvan did it. He himself had never been content in any place but the first. Even under those wilier than he, like his father, or those wiser than he, like the White, he’d chafed. Burned.

  It was, no doubt, a flaw in his character.

  “I’m making you a satrap,” Gavin said. And let be crushed by that whoever may be.

  Corvan coughed up tea. Most satisfying.

  “Are you insane?” Corvan asked. “My lord.”

  “It’s pretty much what you already are, and I am still the Prism. It is my prerogative. They’ll try to stop me, but so long as you don’t massacre the Seers, no one of the other satraps or members of the Spectrum are losing anything. I will propose that you get to name a Color on the Spectrum, but allow myself to lose on that point so they have some victory for their egos. Your new satrapy will be a second-rate satrapy for a few generations. Those will be political battles those who follow us will have to fight. Survival first.”

  “But why?” Corvan asked. “What do you get?”

  “We’ve already discussed this. Food. Seeds. We already know things are going to be tight, but the island is big enough to keep us from starvation until spring. But if we don’t get seeds for next year—”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I give our people a sense of purpose, and I give them another reason to obey you, to make a new life here and stay, even once things start to go well enough that they could leave.”

  Corvan set his teacup down. “Your pardon, Gavin, but you forget how well I know you. There’s more to it than that.”

  Gavin smirked. “I need you to believe in me, Corvan. When the time comes. There are crises coming, and I will need to move quickly. I need to know you have my back, instantly.”

  Corvan’s back stiffened, brow darkened. Gavin hadn’t seen the man angry in many years. “My lord, some men believe in Orholam, some believe in gold, but I believe in you, and to this I will hold. Fealty to One, as you should know.”

  “You think it unworthy of me to question you?” Gavin asked.

  Corvan’s lips were tight, eyes lidded.

  “It is,” Gavin said. “You’ve more than proved yourself. But your faith will be tested.”

  “And will come through the fire purer than before, doubtless.”

  “Thank you, Corvan. Your pardon. Satrap Danavis.”

  “My lord,” Corvan said quietly. “Thank you for what you did. With the blue bane. I know… I know it must have been awful, but thank you for doing it.”

  Gavin stood, said nothing. Popped his neck right and left. He’d summoned the people to the great square. There were plans to build a stadium, but they hadn’t progressed far on it yet
. Regardless, he was going to have to give a talk. Bolster support for Corvan.

  “Lord Prism,” Corvan said quietly. “I don’t know if I can be a satrap. Not even of a second-rate satrapy.” It was a mercy, switching the subject, saying his piece about Gavin’s slaughter and then letting it go.

  “Nonsense. It’s just like being a general, except that if you’re any good at it, you’ll rarely have to watch your people die.”

  The general snorted. It would be harder than that, in the environment he was leading his people into, and they both knew it. Then Gavin’s friend squinted. “My lord,” Corvan said. “The rebels have my daughter. You making me a satrap will make Liv a thousand times more valuable to them.”

  Corvan always was quick.

  Gavin stood, and looked to the people crowding the stadium, gathering to listen to him, hoping he’d speak, but willing to just get a glimpse of him. He said, “You know what you can’t do with a satrap’s daughter when you’re looking for support among neutral parties?”

  For once, Corvan didn’t have a ready answer.

  “Kill her,” Gavin said. “I hold you in my eyes, Corvan. I won’t forget.”

  The man’s face contorted for an instant with sudden grief, sudden hope, and his shoulders heaved. He looked away from Gavin, trying to control himself. Then he dropped to his knees, and farther, lying prostrate at Gavin’s feet. More than respect and thankfulness, it was veneration. Worship.

  “You would do this, for me?” Corvan said.

  “I do it for many reasons, my friend. There is no unadulterated altruism.”

  “But altruism abides. I know you, lord.”

  “Please stand, my friend, it grows awkward.” And indeed, around the square, and from the wood-hewn balconies of golden buildings all around, men and women, and even children who couldn’t have known to what they paid obeisance, were dropping to their knees, to their faces where there was room.

  It touched Gavin’s heart. They’d lost everything because he’d failed. Not one had eaten his fill for the last months, because they didn’t know how long their food would last. Everyone had worked from dawn to dusk and beyond, every day. They lived in great longhouses, not homes, stuffed with strangers. They had no wealth, little hope, and lots of pain, and yet what little they had, they offered him freely.