The Blinding Knife (102 page)

“A drafter we trust? You mean that any drafter can…” She’d seen Atirat atop the bane, of course, but—Dervani Malargos?

“Any sufficiently talented drafter, yes. In centuries past, it led to bloodbaths, as every green would tear every other apart, each in their quest to become a god. And then the gods would war with each other. But that time is past.” He smiled magnanimously. He opened a hand, and there was a choker in it with an odd, throbbing black jewel at the center. “I told you that I had a purpose in mind for you, Aliviana, a great purpose befitting the greatest of my superviolets. So tell me, can you now guess what it is?”

Andross Guile stood in his cabin, examining himself. He stood, shirtless, with no hood, no cowl, no dark spectacles, the curtains open. He looked at his hands, his arms, and then, last, he looked at his eyes. The broken red halo he’d been hiding for months was gone. He still had all his colors—sub-red, red, orange, and yellow—entwined halfway through the irises of his shocking blue eyes, but they were in balance now.

He’d seen the Blinder’s Knife work before—and it didn’t work like this. That knife killed. But when he looked at his shoulder, it was flawless, not even the skin broken. He looked at his eyes again, certain it was some trick. But there the halo was, stable. And he felt hale. He felt better than he’d felt in fifteen years, twenty. He’d had to sink into his own discipline in order to keep the red from driving him mad—and at the end there, he wasn’t sure he was winning.

Now he was simply a drafter again. A polychrome with a good ten years left in his eyes.

This, this changed
everything
.

Sometime not long before dawn, Kip washed ashore. He couldn’t take credit for swimming in. He’d barely had the strength to float and breathe for the last few hours. He crawled far enough up the sand not to get pulled out to sea and collapsed like a beached whale.

He woke to someone picking at his pockets, around noon. He floundered, slapping their hands away, afraid he was under attack. He sat up, and saw that there were at least a dozen bodies washed up on the beach around him.

The looter started laughing. Kip blinked up at him, but the young man had the blinding noonday sun burning over his shoulder. He was dressed in a dirty white tunic and cloak adorned with many bands of color. He also had a pistol dangling from his hand.

“Oho, I stopped at the right beach, didn’t I?” the young man said. “Lucky, aren’t I?”

Kip looked down the beach and saw the young man’s dinghy on the beach. He must have seen all the dead from the water and decided to loot what he could. Kip was thirsty. “You have any water?” he croaked.

“In the boat. Food, too.”

Kip stood with difficulty. The young man didn’t help him up. Then it hit him. He knew that voice. He squinted against the brightness. “Oh no,” he said.

“Bit slow, aren’t ya?” Zymun said. He stepped forward and punched Kip in the face.

Kip fell and sat heavily in the sand. He checked his nose, eyes streaming. On the bright side, it wasn’t broken. He stood slowly,
walked over to the dinghy. He halfway emptied the skin. He had a headache that he thought was a hangover. He hadn’t had one of those before. Plus he was lightsick. Every part of his body hurt. He had a gash along his ribs and his left arm was throbbing from being stabbed.

Kip considered attacking Zymun, who was rubbing his hand: punching Kip had hurt his fist. But Zymun had a
gun
. He would see if Kip tried to draft—which right now sounded as appetizing as gargling sewage—and Kip was feeling about as agile as a hundred-and-twelve-year-old man. Kip had seen the boy draft, long ago. He had no doubt that Zymun had the will to use that pistol. He got in the boat.

“Take off that belt and give it to me. Then tear off a strip of your shirt and tie it around your eyes,” Zymun said. “Slowly.”

Kip did both. He felt Zymun push the dinghy into the water. Kip lunged forward, tearing off his blindfold.

Zymun was clinging to the prow with one hand, bobbing in the water, halfway to climbing into the boat, and he had the pistol leveled at Kip’s face. “Back. Back!” he said. “I can’t hold on here for long, so if you’re not seated and blindfolded in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your face.”

Settling back onto his bench, Kip pulled the blindfold back up, defeated. He’d
almost
done it. Almost. The cloak of failure draped easily around his slumped shoulders. Kip Almost. Again.

No. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t that Kip anymore. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t rejected.

He had gotten into the Blackguard. He had been accepted by the best drafters and fighters in the world. He had been accepted by his father. He had fought a king and wights and a god. He’d made huge mistakes: he’d been stupid and weak and cowardly and rejected. Without him, his father wouldn’t have been stabbed. But he also had pulled his father from the waves, had saved his life when no one else could. Kip had donned Almost as his spectacles. There was a middle path, a golden mean between the whore’s son and the Prism’s. He wasn’t really Kip Godslayer, but he also wasn’t the boy who’d knuckled under to Ramir. Not anymore. I am what I do, and I am Breaker.

He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness. He who has ears, let him hear.

It’s time for me to break that old lens.

“Take the oars,” Zymun said. As Kip reached blindly for them, he heard Zymun slip into the boat. Then he felt luxin encase his hands, locking them around the oars. “You row for an hour, and then I’ll give you food and more water. Go on! We got a long way to go, brother.”

Kip started rowing. His left arm did not appreciate it. “Brother?” he asked. His voice came out calm, unafraid, unashamed.

“My grandfather Andross Guile’s summoned me to the Chromeria. He said the rest of his family hadn’t turned out. Said he’s considering adopting me. Said he has big plans.” He paused. “What, didn’t you know? I’m Karris and Gavin’s son. I’m Zymun White Oak.”

Kip’s heart dropped out of his chest, punched a hole in the deck, and killed a dozen fish on its way to the sea floor.

He heard a metallic scrape of the pistol being examined, and he thought that maybe Zymun had decided to kill him after all. Then Zymun barked a laugh. “Holy fuck am I lucky,” he said to himself. “Would you look at that? This gun wasn’t even loaded.”

Gavin woke to someone slapping his face. He felt awful. The cabin was dark and stank of men who hadn’t washed in ages and bilgewater and seaweed and fish and human waste. There were manacles on his wrists, and he was naked except for a breechclout.

Another slap cracked across his cheek, hard enough to put the taste of blood in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He looked at the man in front of him. His lungs and throat felt raw from the seawater he’d tried to breathe.

“Gunner, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. His voice was raw, too. Last night was a dim memory. “What are you doing?”

“Can’t draft, can ya?”

Gavin held up his hands, empty, helpless. It was so dim in the cabin it would take him a couple of minutes to draft enough to be a threat to
anyone. And summoning the will would be a problem, too, with how terrible he felt.

“Give me a couple minutes,” he said. His left eye was swollen. There was—Oh, Orholam! Gavin checked his chest. It was uninjured. What the hell kind of nightmares had he been having? Thinking he’d been stabbed? Had he been drugged and smuggled off the flagship?

“Your eyes are as blue as Ceres’s, Lord Guile. Not a touch of halo in ’em. Always hated luxlords putting on airs. Ordering people around. Not willing to pull their own weight.” He laughed low, as if he’d said something clever. “But I gots my own solution to the little injustices life brings under my purview. It ain’t quite the ship of state, but she is a stately ship, is she no?”

“This your boat?” Gavin asked, still disoriented. He was seated on a bench next to a skinny man with white hair and beard, big eyes, half clothed. All of the men down here were skinny and half clothed, all drinking water or tearing into hardtack. All wearing chains. All watching him.

“Yes, my
boat
. The
Bitter Cob
, I call her, for how she’ll leave your nethers raw. She belongs to me, and now you belongs to her. Serve well, Guile. For if this old girl goes down, you go down with her.”

The other end of his manacles snapped shut around the oar.

“Gunner…” Gavin said, warning.

“
Captain
Gunner, Number Six. Or you get a whipping.”

“Orholam damn you, don’t you know who I am?!” It had been almost two decades since Gunner had worked for Gavin. Maybe time had changed him too much for the man to recognize him without his rich clothes.

Gunner grinned. “He who asks, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ is the one who doesn’t know the answer. But here’s the thing, Gavin Guile. I’m going to give you the opportunity to find out.”

“Not Gavin,” Gavin said defiantly. “Dazen. My name is Dazen Guile.”

Gunner threw open the door and daylight poured in. “Whatever guile you use makes no matter to me. You’re Galley Slave Six. Third row, middle seat. But don’t worry, you row strongly and obey alacritously, and you’ll get a head seat in six months. Good to have goals, ain’t it?” He grinned toothily. “Boys?”

Gavin said nothing. He didn’t resist, for in the open door he’d seen
something worse than bondage. In the dim near-night of the reeking cabin, he hadn’t noticed: colors were always muted by darkness. But with the opening of that door, with the sky and the birds and sails, and the pure puissant light that Gavin had been waiting to soak up to use to break these chains and escape, he saw something worse. He couldn’t split the colors from that pure white light. He couldn’t split the colors because he couldn’t draft the colors. He couldn’t draft the colors because he couldn’t
see
the colors. The ignorant speak of subchromacy as color-blindness, when it really is only color confusion.

But Gavin
was
color-blind. All the world was gray. It was as Gunner had tried to tell him. In one instant, everything that was special about Gavin Guile had been stripped away. He not only wasn’t the Prism anymore, he wasn’t even a drafter. The door to the deck slapped closed, and chains rattled through the handles, trapping Gavin in a blacker darkness than any he had ever known.

From millimeter waves to martial artists to
Magic: The Gathering
, I needed a lot of help with this one. In addition to those I’ve thanked in previous books (whom I still owe), a few people deserve repeated or new thanks. Thank you first to my wife, Kristi, without whom I’d be working some job I hated. Thanks for tolerating the six-day workweeks for the last couple years, honey. I’ll try to be more sane… eventually. Thank you to Elisa, for taking on so many of the business duties so that I can write more. Thank you to Don Maass, Cameron McClure, and the rest of DMLA for finding the right people for us to work with, for guidance, for expert explanations, and for excellent story advice and encouragement. The writer’s life is too often solitary, and you’ve been sanity and wisdom.

Thank you to Orbit Books (Devi, Anne, Alex, Tim, Susan, Ellen, and Lauren P. especially), who all continue to amaze me with the hard work they do, their innovation, and their responsiveness. I hear horror stories from writers who landed elsewhere, and I’m glad to call Orbit home. Thank you to all those behind the scenes who make the whole machine run so smoothly.

Thank you to Mary Robinette Kowal (
Shades of Milk and Honey
) for being my first ever beta reader. Excellent feedback, and great catches. You made the book better. Plus, that one thing, that place in book 3 where things look really bad, and you suggested something to make it utterly horrible? Yeah, I’m totally stealing that.

Thank you to mathematics professor Dr. N. Willis, who read
The Black Prism
and immediately asked me if I’d played
Magic: The Gathering
. (His sneaky way of seeing if I would play with
him
, without admitting his geekery straight out.) I had never played
MtG
, but soon
saw the mathematical beauty of the game. The seed for the in-world game Nine Kings was planted there (though the mechanics and play are different). To forestall some emails I know I’ll get about this: Yes… but it’ll be years. Thanks also for helping me structure the Blackguard trial, which somehow got incredibly complicated. Go figure.

Thank you to a certain special forces friend of mine, E.H., who got me the (declassified, totally legal!) brief on millimeter wave technology. Who says fantasy can’t use cutting-edge science?

A big thanks to Sergeant Rory Miller, whose books on violence should become necessary texts for those who wish to depict violence convincingly in their fictional worlds, and for those who wish to avoid it in the real one! (Start with
Meditations on Violence
.) For one thing only I don’t forgive him: talking about rates of adrenaline release in a world and time period that doesn’t yet have the word “adrenaline” was hell. (Thanks to Peter H. at Powell’s for hand-selling that book to me—and hand-selling mine to others!)

Thank you to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose “Ulysses” I quoted briefly in both
The Black Prism
and
The Blinding Knife
as being written by Gevison. Immortal lines, sir. Meant to acknowledge you in the last book and overlooked it. My apologies.