The Blood Mirror

The next thing he was aware of, he was lying on the ground, blinking at concerned faces ringing him.

  “Orholam’s hairies, Breaker, you almost fell in the fire,” Ferkudi said. “If Big Leo hadn’t grabbed you—”

  “Does he have the falling sickness?” Conn Arthur asked Tisis.

  “Stop!” Kip said. “Silence, please.” He reached after memories that were fading like a scent in the wind.

  A scent. That was it. Something burning.

  No, something that had been burning.

  Kip opened his eyes and grabbed a stick from the fire. He stubbed it out on the ground and walked away, wafting the smoking wood in front of him, concentrating.

  As with the first link of a chain, the rest came as he pulled on that. The smell, the memory, was from a burning village.

  He blinked. Blinked again. He went back to the fire to stand next to Tisis. He murmured in her ear, “Was I gone for long, just now?”

  “What?” she asked. “No. A few heartbeats.”

  Oh, good.

  “I’m sorry, but I must ask,” Conn Arthur said. “Are you ill? More to the point, are you too ill to lead us?”

  “No, and no,” Kip said. “It was momentary, I’m better now. I must have eaten something that disagreed with me last night.”

  Winsen cleared his throat behind his fist. “Didn’t sound like she disagreed much.”

  The rest of the Mighty cracked up.

  “Hey!” Kip said.

  In a falsetto, as if in the throes of passion, Big Leo went, “Ah! Ah!”

  Kip’s silver tongue failed him. He glanced at Tisis.

  Her color was high, but she shot back at Big Leo immediately, “Oh, you think that was me?” She looked over at Kip significantly.

  They burst out laughing.

  “Ah! Ah!…?” Big Leo said, somehow managing to append a question mark to his falsetto while giving Kip the side eye.

  Kip nodded, taking his lumps. “Fine. Fine. I’ll practice making acceptably manly… ejaculations. Nightly. While you boys get to cuddle with each other.”

  “Ooo,” Big Leo said.

  “That’s low, brother,” Winsen said. “Did Ferk tell you how Big Leo threw his arm over me last night?”

  “No,” Tisis said. “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t get away! He wouldn’t wake up!”

  “A guy gets lonely,” Big Leo said defensively.

  “I need a new tent mate,” Winsen said. “Ferk? I know you snore, but I can deal…”

  “That wasn’t snoring,” Cruxer said. “I do not know what it is. We all eat the same food, but this man’s anus… If we could weaponize his farts…”

  “Those were farts?!” Big Leo said. “I thought we were being shot at! They woke me up like six times!”

  “Wait, you woke up six times? So you were awake?” Winsen said. “Why didn’t you let go of me?”

  “Oh, come on,” Ferkudi said, “maybe I fart a bit more than some of you. But at least mine don’t stink.”

  “Ferk,” Tisis said, “I smelled you from our tent fifty paces away.”

  “Now you’re just piling on,” Ferkudi said. “Go on, have your fun, but I don’t know why I always end up being the…” He trailed off as it dawned on him. “Wait, I really am the butt of the Mighty, aren’t I? This is my destiny.”

  “Why don’t you all go check with Ben-hadad if he needs anything,” Kip said. He just noticed that Conn Arthur hadn’t said a word in several minutes, since they started joking. Kip had been distracted by his friends, but the man stood like a bear on its hind legs, staring at you, uncertain whether to plop down on all fours and amble away or to charge you with sudden fury.

  Tisis left last, giving him a kiss on the cheek and saying, “I’m sorry. That was wicked of me. You’ll have to punish me later.”

  “Right. As if I’d punish you for…” Kip trailed off. “That was me missing the point, wasn’t it?”

  She winked at him and left, leaving Kip with the glowering giant.

  As Kip studied him, though, he looked less angry and disapproving and more bereft. This was a man to whom joy was only a memory.

  When he finally spoke, the conn said, “Congratulations on your nuptials.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re away from safe territory now. I think you pitching your tent away from the camp is a bad idea. You should be in the center of camp. You and your bride can carry on as you will. Our people aren’t shy about such things.”

  “Right,” Kip said lamely. He’d thought the big man’s comments were going to be about something else entirely.

  “Sibéal was deeply impressed by what she witnessed last night.”

  “She was?” Kip said.

  “But I see that you’re still pretty young, too.”

  It stung, of course, being slapped down by a big, imposing older man. He was partly right, too. Sex jokes with his buddies? Or were they his buddies? Shouldn’t they be his men? Shouldn’t he, their leader, demand more respect?

  The old Kip would have sucked that insult into his big old blubbery ego and gnawed on it, cracking apart bone and marrow of the insult and eventually returning with his own mind made up.

  That Kip hadn’t been all wrong. Because the opposite approach would be to attack Conn Ruadhán Arthur in return. As any young blowhard would.

  “You’re not wrong,” Kip said. “But tell me, where’s saying that aloud to me come from? You’re a quiet man, and not stupid. Was that a test, or was it a friendly warning that your people distrust me because of my youth already and I should be careful, or did it come from some bitterness at our camaraderie?”

  The conn looked at Kip through tight blue eyes. He stroked his red, red beard. “It was a test. I didn’t have it all laid out sly-like. Just had a thought and wanted to see if you’d lose your temper if I said it to your face,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of man you are, Kip Guile. But you make me nervous. You led us to a great victory at Deora Neamh. Maybe a small victory in size, but strategically important and flawlessly planned, and you did it immediately after we joined you, which inspires us. How’d you do that?”

  “I’ve read some books,” Kip said.

  Truth was, he had read Corvan’s books—but not like fifty of them. Maybe four. What he’d done at Deora Neamh wasn’t exactly forging new military doctrine: a diversionary raid was pretty basic, and though he’d never read about anyone’s using superviolet flares for communication, he surely couldn’t be the first to come up with it.

  But he’d also absorbed a lot of cards, a lot of memories. Surely among them must be some of the greatest tacticians of all time. Kip knew he should feel worried about dead men in his head.

  Except they weren’t like invaders. The memories sat on one shelf in the library of his mind, and he knew which memories were his and which were not. He felt no more threatened by those memories than by a vivid book. Well, usually.

  Suddenly passing out because he’d stepped through an unseen trip wire of Daimhin Web’s memories was unnerving. And could maybe be dangerous if it happened in the middle of battle or something. But mostly it just was. For once he didn’t overthink it.

  If he could find a tactician in his head and plunder that man’s thinking in order to save his life and his friends, to Kip that didn’t feel any different from studying General Corvan Danavis’s tactics during the False Prism’s War: sure, it felt a little strange to scrutinize someone close to you by the same standards you applied to the greats of history, but you got over it.

  “You read some books,” Conn Arthur said flatly.

  “Father Violet himself said he learned all he knew of fighting from books, and that he fought his last battle by the same tactics he’d used to win his first. The art isn’t knowing what to do, it’s knowing exactly what your people can do, and getting them to do it at the right time. I haven’t been tested on those parts at all.”

  “So despite our effortless victory, you’re worried you don’t know what you??
?re doing.”

  “We got lucky. And I’m worried it won’t scale. That my skills won’t grow as quickly as our army does.”

  The conn snorted. “That’s what you’re afraid of.”

  “Why’s that funny?” Kip asked.

  “Because it hasn’t even occurred to you to be afraid that no one will join you. I can’t tell if your total expectation of success is a function of your youth and inexperience, or insanity, or a deserved confidence. Oddest of all, I’m not sure it matters at this point.”

  “But,” Kip said.

  “But it will matter later,” Conn Arthur said. He seemed as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to say it. He wasn’t trying to make Kip angry now. He was deeply worried. “Someday we’ll face the White King himself or one of his generals, and I don’t want that day to be the day we find out it really was madness or youth all along.”

  “That’s a lot of anxiety for you to tie up around some puerile jokes,” Kip said.

  “It’s not just the contents of the jokes. It’s that you’re joking. You’re enjoying yourself out here,” Conn Arthur said.

  “I was,” Kip said lightly.

  But the conn’s point sank deep.

  Perhaps the hairy bear of a man mistook how quickly Kip could shift from jokey to thoughtful, though. The conn said in a way that made it clear he was quoting someone, “‘A man who loves war will be feared by his foes; he should be feared by his friends.’”

  Kip had been careless. Conn Arthur looked like a badass warrior. He would, if he lived long enough, probably become one. But he’d probably never fought until yesterday. The man was shaken. He didn’t understand what it does to you to see a pile of fresh heads stacked in a pyramid, what it meant to find half your friend’s leg lying on your pack or to laugh as a musket ball snapped past your ear because hearing that snap meant they’d missed. He hadn’t seen how precious any laughter at all is, because sometimes, at the campfire, a laugh was the only thing that kept you from thinking too hard about that thing you’d seen or that thing you’d done.

  But Kip had been careless. Part of a warrior’s duty was to remember what it had been to be a civilian. To protect that innocence, and not sneer at it.

  Kip recognized the quote. “Erastophenes, Tactics, the fourth scroll, if I recall correctly?”

  The conn shook his head. He didn’t know where it was from.

  “It’s from the conclusion in the sixth scroll, actually,” Kip said. “You pass. I’m glad to see you’re not a man who pretends to know what he doesn’t. At least in some things.”

  “You’re testing me now?” Conn Arthur said.

  “Have you heard the quote from Veliki Eden: ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it’? Do you think he was kidding?”

  “I’ve heard it,” the conn said. “I’ve always taken that to mean that to their sorrow, men are fools, ever rushing to arms.”

  “I take it different: war is hell, but hell’s where all my friends are.”

  Conn Arthur looked pensive. “Time will tell which of us is right. Perhaps both. I only hope for us all that your knowledge becomes wisdom painlessly. Your pardon, Lord Guile.”

  Kip nodded, surprised that the man would ask to be dismissed. But before he had gone far, the conn stopped and turned back.

  “One last thing. As I said, my people aren’t shy about matters of the root and cave… but a little consideration for those trying to sleep nearby does go a long way.”

  “Right,” Kip said. Root and cave? Oh. “Right!”

  When the hour and a half had passed, Ben-hadad hadn’t yet fixed the first skimmer, and he’d also found other potentially catastrophic cracks on three of the other skimmers.

  Kip elected to leave them behind, and headed out with only four skimmers loaded with the best fighters. Tisis stayed behind. She said, “I’m more use to you as an ear and tongue than as another gun.” She looked momentarily perplexed. “Not that that was supposed to rhyme.”

  “Such things occur from time to time.”

  “Very funny, you’re such a tease,” she said.

  “You know I always aim to please.” He frowned. What the hell? “I know that’s the kind of silly thing I’d do,” Kip said, “but I swear I didn’t intend… to.”

  He blinked. “That also wasn’t my intent—”

  “It’s fine, my dear, I know what you…” She seemed to struggle to form a different word. Then in defeat, she said, “… meant. Kip, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but the effect is strong. Let—”

  “Superviolet!” she said.

  It seemed the first line could be anything, but as if in some inescapable chain of cause to effect, it was impossible not to follow it with a rhyming couplet. Slant rhymes worked. How about if you ended a line with a word that didn’t have a rhyme? Oh… superviolet! She hadn’t simply meant to rhyme with let; she meant he needed to look at superviolet!

  He narrowed his eyes to the superviolet spectrum and saw the color storm whipping past them in ordered violence. Like a mechanical octopus, every arm articulated with a million hinges, the storm swept the camp, but each segment of the arm moved only in right angles.

  Kip handed his superviolet lenses to Tisis so she could see it, too.

  A few people were looking up around the camp, quizzical looks on their faces. Of those who were moving about, they too were moving only in the same straight lines.

  The superviolet was everywhere.

  And then, before he could even say anything, it was gone.

  “Are you okay?” Tisis asked.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because it all swirled around you in a weird funnel cloud before it disappeared.”

  “It did?” He’d thought it was everywhere, but then, if he had been in the middle of a cloud of it, he would have.

  “It was like it was looking for you.”

  And it found me.

  Chapter 43

  It was one part practicality. A pinch of indecision. A dash of kindness. And four parts cowardice.

  Teia flicked on only the blue and superviolet lights as she came into the Prism’s practice room again. She’d taken to training more and more here while she marshaled her courage to talk to Gav Greyling.

  Fine, while she avoided talking to Gav Greyling.

  She tried not to come here too much, but the practice room had become her haven. There were good memories here, and light controls, and mirrors, and privacy—all the necessary ingredients to practice light splitting.

  She tried not to come here too much, but she didn’t try very hard.

  With the master cloak, invisibility had become stunningly simple. She put it on, opened herself to paryl, and it did the rest, flawlessly.

  Ah, blessed, blessed invisibility.

  There were still things to be aware of. She was invisible, not silenced. She still left footprints. If she pulled the cloak over her eyes, she was blind herself, so in well-lit areas, she had to stare down at her feet and only steal glimpses up, knowing her disembodied eyes might appear to anyone who happened to be looking in just the right place. The cloak was long enough to cover her feet, but any movement that displaced it, such as running or descending stairs, could expose her legs. Also, its length meant that it brushed the ground. Any dirt it picked up from the ground, it carried, visibly.

  Similarly, if she didn’t launder it regularly, the dust it picked up from the air slowly made it less effective. Of course, slaves did all the laundry in the Chromeria, and of course, Teia wasn’t going to let the master cloak out of her sight, so she had to figure out ways to launder it herself. Sometimes in this very room.

  She’d even prepared her lies: the washboard was good for hand strength, those incompetents had torn her cloak the last time, she kind of enjoyed a simple task like this…

  Weak lies, and she’d not had to use them yet.

  But after much practice, the cloak had become simply another tool. It enabled things impossible
without it, and it had limitations, but it quickly became a known quantity. It wasn’t a sword or spear that required years of study to master, it was more like a pair of boots: you figured out what grip they gave you, you broke them in, and then you forgot about them.

  What was more interesting for Teia than learning how to use it was trying to learn how it worked. She’d put on a single red light in the practice room, and use the cloak, then extend her will into the cloak to discern how it was splitting that red light. Then she’d repeat with orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, for hours.

  It had yielded interesting discoveries over the months of practice since Kip left, if not the ones she was looking for. First, with a cloud of paryl gas surrounding her, Teia became the next best thing to a superchromat. The gas itself was a filter like polarized glass. It filtered blues into the perfect blue for making blue luxin, filtered reds into the perfect red for making red luxin, and so forth. If she held a bubble of paryl gas perfectly so that it covered one eye, she could look at any luxin and tell how well it had been drafted: if it looked and felt exactly the same to each eye, it had been drafted perfectly, and therefore probably by a superchromat.

  She was sure there were handy applications for her discoveries, but she wasn’t sure what they were, and there was no one she could really ask. The only one she’d really come up with was that, if she remembered to draft a paryl cloud, she could now differentiate red and green. She still couldn’t see them as different, though, so it was a cold comfort.

  One day she was sitting on the floor of the practice room. Always fearful of interruptions, she’d run through the obstacle course a few times first to work up a sweat, and now she sat as if winded, wearing her skimpiest workout attire. The point was to have as much skin exposed as possible. She had to feel the colors, and dammit if that wasn’t taking a lot of practice. So she sat on the floor, nearly naked but sweaty, so that if anyone came in she could pass for someone just cooling from her exertions.

  This new life of hers was always lies and preparations for lies.

  She had her eyes closed and a headband functioning as a blindfold, every sense attuned to the blue (perhaps?) light, when she heard a hiss as of escaping gas. Her eyes snapped open and she pushed the headband back up her into unruly hair. She grabbed her tunic and looked toward the door.