The Broken Eye (69 page)

Kip looked from one to the other. Why were they all still whispering? Why were they standing right at the door to the promachos’s room?

“How much did she overhear?”

Grinwoody shot a glance at Kip, as if wondering that Andross wished Kip to hear this, then said, “Most everything you said at the couch. She awakened almost immediately, and moved to eavesdrop soon after. She won’t have been able to hear any of this.”

“Well, then, Kip, your move,” Andross said. “Unless I miss my guess, she’ll try to exploit the schism in our family, and being the green that she is, she’ll be impulsive enough to think she needs to act immediately, so she won’t wait for instructions from her much more formidable sister Eirene. I would imagine Tisis will come to speak to you in tears at some point this week, playing the damsel in distress. That tends to work well on men who wish they were strong. Don’t thank me, she’s too young for my tastes, and as you surmised, not good at feigning pleasure. It’s a skill most women pick up early, so I’m not sure if she’s stupid or stubborn. Quite the hotblood, though, according to her best friend. Eager for the bed, though she’s kept her suitors short of the jade gate itself.”

“Jade gate?”

“Her quim. It’s her family’s horse trader roots showing through. They’ve been nobles a bare century. Knowing how some value such things, she’s intended to sell her virginity dearly, even if it’s virginity only by the most technical of definitions. Her friend, being her friend, swore up and down that her chastity, such as it is, wasn’t merely for bargaining purposes, though. She claimed Tisis has always had romantical notions about her first time being special. Hmmph, youth. I imagine she’ll be too smart to lead her efforts on you with seduction, but as long as you play your cards right, she’ll flop on her back in no time. She did for me. Not sure how you’ll fit into the
special
first-time. But she’ll remember it forever, and surely that is one definition of special, is it not?”

“Do you poison every well you drink from?” Kip asked. The sheer meanness of the man baffled him.

“I just told you, I didn’t drink from that well. I left it for you, on purpose, in case you were delicate about sharing with a better man. You throw my kindness in my face. Perhaps you are thick in more than the obvious sense. We’ve spoken too long. Begone.”

Kip kept his curses and his questions to himself, and obeyed his grandfather’s order, just like any other soldier in the promachos’s army. The Blackguards outside the door said nothing, but then, that was what they were supposed to do, wasn’t it?

Four puzzled slaves were waiting for him at his room. “My lord,” one said, “there was a crime reported?”

Kip stepped past them into the room. Everything was pristine. The desk had been replaced. The feather bed had been replaced. Every surface was gleaming with polish. Even his purse was back in its hiding spot. Kip dismissed the slaves with an apology. They looked at him like he was crazy.

And who’s to say they’re wrong? What am I doing?

I’m being used in fights I know nothing about, and I’m taking sides based purely on the personal charisma of the players, not on what’s wrong or right, or where I should be, or even what’s most advantageous. I’ve been acting like a child.

Andross knew exactly what I was going to do when he trashed my room. I’m that predictable.

He felt suddenly sick to his stomach.

In Nine Kings, I’d be the Blunderbuss—good only for short ranges, and easily picked up by any enemy and pointed wherever he wished.

What am I going to do?

Chapter 62

~Shimmercloak~

The perspective isn’t right. It’s hovering around waist height, swinging back and forth. It’s a hand, swinging as a young woman walks. She has something cupped in her hand so that it will be concealed from anyone in front of her, but it’s longer than her hand, and this perspective is perfect to see as much of the weapon as possible.

This card isn’t a person; it’s a thing, and the perspective is what the artist had chosen to show.

A short, jagged blade, obsidian edges with an ivory core. Not so much shaped like a knife as like a shark’s tooth, a broad triangle with a winking diamond in the center.

The bouncing accelerates as the young woman begins jogging.

Before I can see much more, the perspective swings violently as the blade slams into a woman’s side, is pulled out, bloody, and then poised at her throat.

With the blade at her throat, now I can see her face. Her irises are stained red, halfway to the halo, and wide with fear and pain. The attacker’s arm is threaded through hers, and the drafter is turned toward a red-painted wall.

The drafter regains her wits; she drafts, soaking up red light, the whites of her eyes filling as with smoke—but this is what the assassin is waiting for. The obsidian edge is rammed into the side of her throat, and suddenly, that black shiny stone is somehow alive. Blood gushes out, and I can’t see if the red that blankets the ivory is from the blood spilling from her neck, or if it glows with an internal light.

I see the drafter’s eyes bleach, not only the natural recession of red from the whites as a drafter finishes drafting, but deeper. As if something is sucking the life’s blood from her. Her sclera go pure white, and then the impossible happens. Her crimson-stained irises—red halfway to the halo—dim and then disappear. As the light of life goes out of her eyes, her eyes are left their natural brown.

I’ve seen dead drafters. Even as a warrior’s scars don’t disappear in death, so a drafter’s scars stay with her: her eyes don’t bleach.

The assassin is already moving, carefully dragging the drafter into an alcove, piling rubbish on her body, using her cloak to clean hands and blade. She tucks the blade away, and my perspective is lost in darkness.

In darkness I stay for long and long, jarred and jostled. Is she running? I lose all track of time. I may be here forever.

The blade comes out in a room lit with lanterns, is handed over to a bent-backed old woman. She washes it in a basin. But the blood doesn’t wash from the diamond. It was a diamond, wasn’t it?

Now, despite washing, it’s a ruby.

No, not a plain ruby. The colors undulate, swirling, pulse like the beating of a heart. The old woman chuckles, delighted. She holds up the living stone to a magnifying lens, studies it minutely.

She moves to a work table, puts the ruby in a delicate vise. In a few minutes, she’s bored a tiny, shallow hole into the gem. Satisfied, she prepares the rest of the room. She pushes everything else off her work table and carefully drapes a long muddy-brown cloak across it. She pulls forward a choker concealed in the collar. Multicolored chains connect choker to cloth. With deft hands, she cracks open the choker, exposing the knotted chains themselves.

Adjusting the chains so they sit just so on the bench, she pulls a stool over, and puts on clear, magnifying spectacles. She draws the ruby forth again, and takes the chimney off her lantern. She screws a tiny post of ivory and obsidian shard into the ruby, and blows out the lantern.

The sound of chains and gears, and then a crack of light. The ceiling splits open and full-spectrum sunshine pours in, bounces off mirrors, and is focused directly on the old woman’s hands. She holds the ruby full in the light with the post down, like one would hold a pen.

The post—her nib—goes red, and she begins dabbing living red ink onto the exposed wires where the cloak’s collar connects. The post writhes with luxin, and the collar chains devour it. The cloak’s own color changes, becoming a redder brown in streaks as she moves from chain to chain. She reaches the end finally, and as she stops, I see that the ruby is now as drained of color as the murdered drafter was.

Clicking her tongue, the old woman examines her work. She sets aside the diamond, runs her hand over the cloth, and finally snaps shut the choker over its chains.

“My part is finished,” she says. “But to make this cloak a shimmercloak, you need to find yourself a Prism willing to give you his life and Will.” She barks a laugh. “Unless you’ve got some other splitter of light at hand?”

Chapter 63

Teia was walking through the evening crowds to clear her head after the afternoon Blackguard practice. Kip had skipped again. That was happening more and more often. Despite that, he wasn’t falling behind. Between his private training sessions with Karris Guile and sparring with the squad under Tremblefist’s personal instruction—and they’d all taken Kip under their wings, giving him pointers at every opportunity—Kip was actually worth his spot on Squad Aleph now. And not just for his mind.

Fine, primarily for his mind.

People were bumping into Teia. She didn’t have a purse on her belt, so she wasn’t terribly alert, but it was irritating. For all the good that being small did her sometimes, when she moved through a crowd, if she wanted go faster than a crawl, she had to really move, ducking and dodging in a way that had become second nature to her, but doing that didn’t exactly engender the meditative thoughtfulness she was seeking. No one bumped into Commander Ironfist. Not on accident, anyway.

Teia remembered an instance of a young woman stepping into the commander’s path just in time to be bowled over. The commander’s reflexes were quick enough that he’d practically snatched the woman out of the air. She’d purred, melting into his arms. The Blackguards had laughed.

The commander hadn’t been amused. As always, he was on his way somewhere more important. He lifted the woman in front of him—and it’s not easy to look seductive when a man lifts you by the armpits—stared her hard in the eye until she nearly wet herself, and dropped her off to the side without a word.

It had kept that woman from ever trying it again, but had backfired where others were concerned.

Teia grinned at the memory and finally emerged from the market. She wasn’t even sure where she was now. Not that it was possible to get truly lost on Big Jasper. She put her hands in her pockets—Blackguard trousers had pockets. She loved them.

There was a note there.

She pulled it out, and a hollow formed in her stomach. Fine flash paper, of course. If she tried to simply open it—or anyone else tampered with it—it would burn up in an instant. She wondered if Karris had been good enough to pass her the orders herself, or if she had people to do that now.

She tore into the bottom right corner, edged the tear around the left side like she’d been taught, and finally opened the note: “Kip is going to be assassinated on a raid, today. Most likely by a Blackguard. Several, possibly. They’ll be at the docks before noon. Save him.” It was in Karris’s hand.

Teia’s breath caught. The docks. The squad’s current safe house was on the way. She ran.

In minutes, she arrived at the safe house. She knocked the code rapidly on the wood, and then opened the door. Cruxer was alone inside, seating a new flint in the cockjaw of his pistol. He looked up. He frowned as soon as he saw the expression on her face. “What’s going on, Teia?”

“Kip. It’s Kip. He’s going to be murdered. We have to go help!” Teia said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Now, Crux!”

Chapter 64

Kip was sitting at his desk with mounds of books threatening to bury him when someone knocked on his door. It could only be Tisis Malargos. Kip had been preparing for this since he’d left the old man’s room. He still wasn’t ready.

The truth was, Kip didn’t really know Tisis. Sure, she’d pretended that she was going to kill him during his Threshing. Sure, she’d single-handedly made him fail by giving him back the bell rope after he’d thrown it away, but perhaps Kip shouldn’t take it personally. He was starting to understand what it was to inherit the enmities of your people. How could it have been personal? She’d never even met him before that day.

And of course, Kip had later killed her uncle. That kind of made them even, didn’t it?

He got up, braced himself, and opened the door.

It wasn’t Tisis. It was two Blackguards, Buskin and Lytos, looking almost like a comedy, Buskin was so short and Lytos was so tall. But they weren’t smiling.

“Know how we been searching the seas?” Buskin asked.

“For my father?” Kip asked eagerly.

“No,” Lytos said at the same time Buskin said, “Yes.”

They shot a look at each other.

“No need to keep it from him if he knows,” Buskin said. “Some of us go looking for the bane, and some of us go looking for the Prism. It’s supposed to be secret.”

“My grand—the promachos told me about it,” Kip said. “And he said I’d get a chance to go.”

“This ain’t that. With so many of us full Blackguards training everyone, Watch Captain Fisk has got us dipping into the nunks to help look for bane. Your number came up.”

“Watch Captain Fisk?” Kip said. “You mean Trainer Fisk?”

“You’d know about his promotion and the schedule if you bothered coming to practice more often,” Lytos said in his odd eunuch’s tenor.

Fisk had been promoted to Karris’s old position as watch captain? That was a small disaster. Fisk had worked with Andross to try to keep Kip out of the Blackguard. For all the times he’d seemed friendly, he was a traitor at the core.

“How long we going to be gone?” Kip asked.

Lytos said, “Back before dark. They don’t want the nunks missing any training—any
more
training, maybe I should say—so you all don’t do overnights.” He looked around Kip’s room. “Nice quarters. You sure you want to give this up for a barracks?”

Right. Because my life is so wonderful and easy. Kip let retorts dance behind his teeth, as if taking the jibe with good humor. “Enough of the easy life for me. I’m ready to buckle down and really start to work.”

“Good. Well, let’s get to it, then,” Buskin said. He really was incredibly short. Even with his silly high shoes.

Suddenly though, Kip really didn’t want to go with these two. There was something off. They hadn’t ever before been hostile to him. It was like something had worked them up. Had he done something to insult them? Maybe it was like his father had warned him: they disliked how easy it seemed he was getting a good life handed to him.