The Blinding Knife

  Gavin walked out the door, and saw Corvan. The man had been weeping, but had dried his eyes and was trying to pretend he hadn’t been.

  Orholam’s great hairies, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

  The men embraced. Said nothing. Walked together down to the beach. The Third Eye followed them. People had gathered, realizing who Gavin was. They watched from a distance. They knelt. It was like they didn’t know how to tell Gavin what he meant to them. It was just as well, because he didn’t know how to take it. He waved to them, nodded.

  “You said before that you were sometimes wrong, right?” he asked Corvan’s beautiful wife.

  “Sometimes,” she said sadly.

  One in a thousand. He’d faced worse.

  “Dazen,” Corvan said quietly. He swallowed, looking out to sea, looking at nothing. “My lord, she tells me if I go with you, I can only make it worse. Otherwise, I’d… My lord, it’s been an honor.”

  And then, as Gavin got onto the skimmer and Corvan pushed the boat out into the gentle surf, The Third Eye said, “Orholam guide you back, Lord Prism.”

  He was sure that she didn’t mean back to the island.

  Chapter 102

  “I’m going to kill him, someday. But he’s good at what he does. I’ll give him that,” Zymun said, rising from their bed in the predawn darkness. Liv was already up and dressed, almost finished fighting her hair into some order. “I’ll let him do the work of uniting the satrapies, and then take it from him. Unless he threatens to botch it, of course.”

  “What are you going to do? Once you become king, I mean.” She slid the hairpins in place, adjusted the bit that was falling in front.

  “Emperor,” Zymun said, correcting her. “And whatever do you mean? What will I do? You’re not very smart, are you?”

  Not smart enough to avoid you in the first place, clearly. She froze. His charm had been slipping more and more frequently. He was a lizard beneath it. There was something wrong with him. Something thin, an essential shallowness. How had she not noticed before? When he touched her now, her flesh grew cold. Her body had known. She’d told herself that she was extricating herself carefully, but she wasn’t: she was afraid. Afraid to be a woman alone in an armed camp. Such fear didn’t befit a drafter. Such fear didn’t befit a woman. He wanted to treat her like she was nothing? Hatred coiled in her breast.

  It took all of her self-control, but she turned and looked at him with a mask of cool condescension. “Zymun, Zymun, Zymun. Emperor? Please. There is no trace of greatness in you.”

  She slipped out of the tent deftly. She was shaking. What about your big plan to make him tire of you? To escape his clutches and make him think it was his idea?

  All in pieces now. Shit.

  Knowing the smart thing to do and having the makeup to do it were two different things. To hell with him.

  Liv went directly to the Color Prince’s tent. He was gone. She found him instead on the outskirts of the camp, greeting new drafters who’d abandoned Ru or other Atashian towns. At least half of them were on their last year or two of life. Cowards, Liv thought.

  But armies are composed of those who join for bad reasons as well as good, and the prince despised no one who helped him. Liv approached him, bowed deeply, and said, “Magnificence, may I have a private word with you?”

  The prince measured her, then excused himself.

  “Zymun is planning to betray you,” she said without preamble.

  “Thank you. Will you teach this class of recruits for me?”

  “What?” she asked. “ ‘Thank you?’ That’s all?”

  He looked at her sharply.

  “My apologies, my prince. I didn’t mean to raise my voice.”

  He favored her with an indulgent smile. “When did you find this out?”

  “I’d suspected he had an… overlarge opinion of himself, but he didn’t say anything treasonous until this morning.”

  “And you came straight to me.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  A retainer emerged from the ranks and started coming toward the prince. He lifted a hand, telling the man to wait.

  “You knew,” Liv said.

  “I knew.”

  “So… Did you send me to spy on him?”

  “You tell me,” he said. Another servant looked ready to come forward, and again he motioned to the woman not to interrupt. Running an army meant making decisions from dawn until dusk and beyond.

  “You weren’t testing him. You were testing me,” Liv said.

  “Oh?”

  “You knew he’d betray you; you didn’t know if I would. So I passed. Was Zymun in on this?” If he had been, that would mean that he was still favored by the Color Prince, and the way Liv had left him wasn’t simply over her loyalty to the prince. She might have just made a powerful enemy, without at the same time making a more powerful friend.

  “Do you know what happens to an egg, when you keep it warm?” the prince asked.

  “It hatches?” Liv said.

  “And when you make it hot?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “It cooks.” He smiled, indulgent, magnanimous. “Everything has a proper time and season. Some things rushed are spoiled. This is why so many of the Chromeria’s wights go mad and become dangerous, not because wights are innately so, but because their drafters get to the end of their human span and then panic. Panicked people do shoddy work. If instead they worked deliberately, over a course of years, to prepare themselves for the transition, their odds of success increase dramatically. If they had people to teach them what to do, just imagine what we might accomplish.”

  “That’s—that’s… wise. And that’s what you’re doing with Zymun?”

  “Zymun is incredibly gifted, and very, very dangerous. There is no human warmth in him. Only a fool would trust a man like that, but by using him? I’ve found that I can trust you. Now, did he know you were coming here?”

  “I’m—I’m afraid he might. I’ve made a terrible enemy of him, my lord.”

  “Forgive me for this, but raise your voice now and swear that Zymun’s a traitor, that you wouldn’t lie to me, and so forth.” The prince’s face twisted. “Do it. Now.”

  “My lord! I swear it to you! Zymun is a traitor—I would never lie to you! You have to believe me!” Liv threw herself at the Color Prince’s knees.

  He backhanded her across the cheek hard enough it rattled her teeth, and she fell to the ground, weeping.

  Two guards lifted Liv and pulled her away, just around a tent, out of sight, but still close enough that she could hear a little of what was said. She heard Zymun speaking, his voice oily slick as usual, totally unafraid. His back must have been toward her, because she couldn’t make out his voice.

  “Zymun,” the Color Prince said, “I’m giving you a small force, drafters and soldiers, whatever composition you want, but only twenty men, and make sure you bring along gunners in that number. I want you to cross the neck at midnight, climb the cliffs, and take Ruic Head. There may or may not be ropes waiting for you. We have spies, but they’re criminals and prone to hysteria. Not trustworthy. Regardless, take Ruic Head and keep flying the Atashian flag. The Chromeria’s fleet is two days out. Let the scout ships through unaccosted, only open up when the main fleet first starts through the neck. I expect you to sink at least a dozen ships. At least. Oh, and take no greens with you. Take blues. The bane will be disorienting until Atirat is come.”

  Zymun said something.

  “No. Absolutely not. I have need of her.”

  Something else. Liv cursed to herself for not being able to hear, but she couldn’t without exposing herself.

  “Zymun,” the Color Prince said, raising his voice as if the young man was farther away. “I trusted you with a vital mission once and you failed. You lost a magic worth more than ten of you. It was my mistake to trust you with that, so I didn’t punish you for it. I had hoped to abort this war before it began. I thought it worth the risk. You’re one
of the very best I have, Zymun. You know that I’ve been lenient with you and why. For a privileged few, I tolerate one failure. One. Understood?”

  Chapter 103

  Commander Ironfist had Kip and Cruxer join him on the central skimmer. Instead of heading directly for Ruic Bay as Gavin had, Commander Ironfist had them work their way up the Blood Forest coast.

  Though they had only been skimming for two hours, Kip was feeling antsy. He didn’t like being trapped on a boat. He tried to enjoy the salt spray and the speed and the small towns they passed. The sea today was much calmer, and the sky was blindingly blue. The sea itself changed color with every bay and shallow.

  They came upon the scout ship so fast they barely had time to split the sea chariots off. They rounded a point, and there it was, approaching the point from the opposite side, flying its broken-chain flag. Commander Ironfist was shouting orders and two of the sea chariots darted off in front of the rest of them.

  The cocca was a small ship. Twenty-five paces long, with a crew of perhaps twenty and lateen sails, and six medium guns per side, balanced on the gunwales the old way instead of outfitted with gunports. It didn’t get a single shot off. A single sailor was manning the swivel gun on the front, trying to load it, when the two sea chariots passed on either side. One set its hullwrecker near the prow, the other on the opposite side near the stern. Then they broke away.

  Kip could hear men shouting, and for what seemed forever, he thought that the explosives had failed.

  Then they went off at the same moment. Muffled thumps blew all the way through the cocca’s hull and out the opposite side as well. There was fire, but it was quenched quickly as the ship went down.

  With four wide holes in the hull, it didn’t take long. At Commander Ironfist’s piercing whistle, the sea chariots regrouped and sealed their individual boats back into place. By the time they were finished, the cocca was underwater. A dozen men and women were paddling in the water or clinging to debris.

  “Commander, should we take captives for interrogation?” Watch Captain Beryl asked.

  Ironfist looked at the people in the water and judged how far they were from shore. It wasn’t far. Leaving them wouldn’t be a death sentence, but Kip knew that they didn’t have the space to take captives and still continue to sink ships. “Our mission’s elsewhere,” the commander said. “By the time they could bring word back to their generals, our battles will be finished, I think.”

  They left and hadn’t gone half an hour farther up the coast before a putrid smell rolled over the skimmer. It was death.

  “There’s a village a league or two from here,” one of the Blackguards said. “Weedling, it’s called. I grew up just a few bays down.”

  The skimmer cruised slowly into Weedling Bay and Kip was relieved to see that the village wasn’t burned to the ground. But there were hundreds of gray shapes crowded onto the beach so thickly that there was hardly any sand visible. Perhaps a dozen locals were walking across the backs of the shapes, carrying machetes and buckets.

  “Are those beached whales?” Cruxer asked.

  “Orholam have mercy,” someone said.

  The wind brought a blast of putrefying flesh and blood to the skimmer and Kip almost gagged. He felt funny. Not just sick or disgusted, but trapped. He wanted to jump into the waves and swim. He wasn’t even sure where. It was a crazed, caged animal feeling.

  “Commander,” one of the Blackguards said, “I don’t feel so good.”

  “It’s just dead fish,” Ironfist said. “Kalif and Presser, draft us some oars.”

  They drafted oars and oar locks and the Blackguards rowed the ship in. When they got within forty paces, the villagers finally noticed them. Some fled outright, while the others merely watched them with hooded eyes.

  A tall older man with some kind of long-bladed spear that he had been using to cut into the thick whaleskin stood on a half-butchered whale with one hand on his hip. “Well, the sea she brings us all sorts of insanity, don’t she?” he said.

  “Are you the conn here?” Commander Ironfist asked.

  “Such as we have,” the man said.

  “I’m Commander Ironfist of the Chromeria Blackguard.”

  “Ironfist? Aye, we’ve heard that name here. Curious boat you have. I’m Conn Mossbeard.”

  He didn’t, so far as Kip could tell, actually have moss in his beard, but it was dyed a pale lichen green.

  “What happened here?” Ironfist asked.

  “Something’s been building for a couple weeks, though it’s not near so strong today,” the conn said. “Livestock acting like there were coyotes in the yard, but none were, you know what I mean? Plowhorses and oxen shying from their harnesses. Horses spooked. Pigs attacking like all the sudden they thought they were javelinas. We had people injured by the score, by beasts they’d known their whole lives. We’re farmers and fishermen here, we knew something wasn’t right. Still don’t know what, though. They say great powers clash, small folk suffer, I don’t know.” He spat.

  Ironfist didn’t interrupt, gestured for the restive Blackguards not to speak either. If the stench of the decaying whales hadn’t been so overpowering, Kip would have jumped off the boat.

  What’s gotten into me?

  “Whales beached yesterday. Heard of it before. Never seen it, and never heard of so many doing it at once. Handy placement if they’re going to do it, I thought at first. We could get enough meat and oil to last us years, but…” He pulled his tunic up and Kip saw that he had a bandage around his side. It was bloody. “I started giving orders, like I done a thousand times. People here know you got to work together for big jobs like this. But they attacked me instead. Men and women I’ve known my whole life. Attacked me and run off. The animals are gone, too. It’s like a madness came. ’Cept it didn’t hit us all. The steadiest men and women, we’re all still here. Coro over there, he used to be an idiot, had fits when he didn’t get exactly one biscuit at dawn, exactly two pieces of bacon at lunch. Now he’s as right as you or me. But them’s were normal, most of them are long gone. Don’t know where. Don’t know what to do but butcher what we can and hope this all blows over like a squall.”

  “Did any of the people act… um, oddly before they went?” a Blackguard named Pots asked. He turned to Commander Ironfist. “Your pardon, Commander.”

  “We’re good people here,” the conn said. “Decent. Devout.”

  “People do strange things when they’re not in their right mind. Things that aren’t truly their fault,” Pots said.

  The conn grimaced. Spat again. “Seemed like folk lost all sense of dec… of decoration, if you take my meaning. I saw… I saw.” He spat again. Avoided eye contact. “Folks were rutting like animals. Folks walking about nekked. Folks grunting and howling and barking. Barking. You heard people called barking mad? I thought it was jus’ something people say. I saw men I’ve known forty years barking at each other. Scared me half to death. Like they was made animals in all but body.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s driving the animals mad, too,” Commander Ironfist said.

  “You feel it?” Pots asked.

  Most of the Blackguards mumbled agreement.

  “I think we better leave,” Commander Ironfist said.

  “Kip, you feel it?” Pots asked.

  “Absolutely,” Kip said.

  “Nerra, you?” Pots asked.

  “No.”

  “Commander?” Pots asked.

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Wil, you?” Pots asked.

  Wil swallowed. “I feel half mad, to tell you the truth.”

  “It’s the greens,” Pots said to Commander Ironfist. “It’s something wrong in green. Lust, loss of self-control, rebellion against authority. The Color Prince has poisoned green.”

  “Atirat,” someone mumbled ominously.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not only affecting drafters; it’s hitting munds and even animals,” Pots said.

  “Mossbeard!” Commander Ironfist called
out. “We’re doing what we can to stop it. Your folk may come back yet. All may be restored to you yet.”

  Conn Mossbeard looked at them with steel eyes. “Restored? I caught my wife with another man, and when she saw me, she just laughed and kept on. I looked into her eyes and couldn’t tell if it was madness plain and simple or if the madness was letting her do what she’d always wanted.”

  Ironfist said nothing.

  “Go play at your wars. Go visit your plagues on someone else. It’s always the little man as pays the piper. I killed my wife, sir, the woman who stayed with me through drought and blight and fire and the death of four daughters for twenty-four years. There’s no restoration here.”

  They rowed away and Mossbeard went right back to slaughtering the whale he stood on without giving them another look.

  “Greens,” Commander Ironfist said without looking at any of them, “you tell me if it gets too bad. If you feel like you’re going to turn on us, tell us. I’m not going to lose anyone today, through madness or death. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kip said with the rest of them.

  They went all the way up the Atashian coast that day, almost as far as Ruic Head, and they sank half a dozen ships. On many of them, the sailors were in disarray, unwilling or unable to follow orders and act as coherent units. It made them easy targets, and they sank them without any trouble.

  It was, frankly, frightening how easy it was. With the combination of their speed and the explosive power of the hullwreckers and the fact that the ships they were preying on were distracted and had never seen anything like the sea chariots—much less prepared for them—they sank ship after ship. But their feeling of invincibility was broken when Pots took a ball in the shoulder. They bound him up, and made it all the way to Ruic Head, where a fort towered on top of the red cliffs there, bristling with artillery that could reach far out into the narrow neck of the Ruic Bay. They approached only close enough to look at the fort’s flags—it was still flying the Atashian colors.

  Commander Ironfist turned them back toward the fleet, and they made it back an hour before dusk, which was a good thing, because it took them another hour of consulting the sextant and compass and skimming and guessing and consulting the sextant and compass again to find the fleet, which was making good progress toward Ruic Head. Three days out now. Kip and the other greens were relieved to get away from the Atashian coast, though, and he could feel the madness receding as they got farther away.