The Blinding Knife (32 page)

Strange. There was no personality to it. No human hand had inscribed these lines. It was lifeless, everything the same. No extra space after a difficult sentence to give a reader time to grapple with the implications. No space in the margins for notes or illuminations. No particular care taken on a memorable line or passage to highlight it for a tired reader. Only naked ink and the unfeeling stamp of some mechanical roller. Even the smell was different.

“I think I’m going to get bored even faster,” Kip said. “It makes a book so… tedious.”

“It’s going to change the world.”

Not to something better. “Can I ask something rude?” Kip asked.

“Generally when you preface a question that way, no, you shouldn’t,” Rea Siluz said.

Kip tried to figure out a more diplomatic way to ask if she was spying on him. He looked up, thinking. “Um, then… do lists of the books students are reading get passed on?”

“If librarians wish to keep their jobs, absolutely. Sometimes we neglect to write down all the titles, or miss things, however.”

“Ah. Can you
miss
that I’ve moved on to this volume?”

“Want someone to underestimate your skills, huh?” she asked.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to underestimate my skill at this point,” Kip said. “I’m hoping my skill takes a leap sometime soon and surprises everyone. Including myself.”

“If you want to take a leap, you have to start playing.”

Kip opened his hands, helpless.

“I’ll teach you,” she said. “At the end of my shift, I can stay late for an hour or two. I’ll bring decks.”

So now, a week later, he was waiting for Rea to come play against him as she had every day.

She came out and gestured Kip to follow her to one of the side rooms. “I’ve figured out your problem,” she said.

“I’m not smart enough for this game?” Kip asked.

She laughed. She had a nice laugh, and Kip was nicely infatuated with her. Orholam, was he fickle or what? But the women here had been a handful of heavenly beads nicer to him than the girls back home. He wondered if things had been unfairly bad before because he’d had the baggage of his mother back home—or if they were unfairly good now because he had the father he had. He couldn’t tell—and he never would. He was who he was, and nothing could change it, nothing could tell him how things would have been if his parents had been different, normal.

“I doubt it’s that, Kip. Every card has a
story
.”

“Oh no.”

“Every card is based on a real person, or a real legend, anyway. But a number of the cards you’ve described to me are archaic, pulled from use years ago. They’re sometimes known as the black cards, or the heresy cards. The odds of the entire game have shifted without those cards. Some cards can’t be countered in ways they easily could have
when those cards were in play, and so forth. You can’t tell anyone you’ve been playing with those cards, Kip. Playing with heresy is a good way to get a visit from the Office of Doctrine. But I’ll tell you this: you won’t win against someone playing with black cards. The basics are still the same, but all the deep strategy books in the last two hundred years have been written around the holes that yanking those cards has created.”

“There’re no books with those cards in them?”

She hesitated. “Not… here.”

“Not here here, or not in the Chromeria?”

“The Chromeria prizes knowledge so highly that even horrid texts describing the rituals the Anatians used when they would pass infants through the flames haven’t been destroyed. Indeed, when they’ve gotten so old that they need to be copied or disintegrate to dust, we still copy them. Albeit with rotating teams of twenty scribes. Each scribe copies a single word, and then moves on to the next book and the next, so that the knowledge may be preserved without contaminating anyone fully. Not everything that goes into the dark libraries is similarly evil—much is simply political, but only the most trusted people are allowed beyond the cages.”

“Like who?” Kip asked.

“The Chief Librarian and her top assistants, of course. The Master of Scribes and his team. Some luxiats who’ve been given special dispensation by the White. Full drafters who have submitted applications for specific research are sometimes granted single books or are accompanied in there. Blackguards, and the Colors. And sometimes the Colors grant permission to certain drafters, but those have to be approved by the Chief Librarian, who answers to the White herself.”

“Blackguards?”

“They’re the most likely to have forbidden magic used against them as they protect the Prism or the White. And, unofficially, they’re also the ones who need to know what longstanding feuds there are, so they can prepare defenses against the right people.”

It was a light in darkness. A way Kip could kill about fifteen birds with one stone: he could learn the game, he could try to dig up dirt on Klytos Blue, and he could try to find out if his mother had simply been smoking too much haze or if there had been something to her accusations about Gavin. All it required was that he do what he’d already decided he had to do: get into the Blackguard. Easy. Ha.

“Blackguards being allowed in doesn’t include scrubs, does it?”

She chuckled. “No. Nice try.”

His immediate problem, though, was the games with his grandfather. And he knew, even though he’d been ignoring it because she was pretty and helpful, that he probably shouldn’t share anything at all with Rea Siluz.

“So I’ve been wasting my time,” Kip said.

“You can win, but you won’t win consistently, even if you play well. The odds you’d judge from are the wrong odds.” She shrugged.

“And I can’t find the real odds by playing because no one plays with the heretical cards Andross Guile has in his decks, and I can’t find out the real odds by studying because I’m not allowed into those libraries?”

“Pretty much.” She looked like she wanted to say more, though.

“Or?” Kip prompted.

“There’s someone who might help you, a woman named Borig.”

“Borig?” It had to be the ugliest name for a woman Kip had ever heard.

“She’s an artist. A little eccentric. Be respectful. The spies who check in on you are accustomed to you and me spending the next two hours playing in this room. If you leave by the back and take the stairs down a level, you can slip out without them seeing you. It’s important, Kip, for her sake as well as yours, that you not be followed or overheard. The Office of Doctrine is more academic now than it once was, but with the recent troubles, there’s been talk of appointing a few luxors. You don’t want to run afoul of people who are afraid. Not now.”

“Luxors?”

“Lights mandated to go into the darkness. Empowered to bring light by almost any means they deem necessary. There were… abuses. This White wouldn’t stand for them to be appointed again, but Orea Pullawr is not a young woman, Kip.”

It made Kip feel sick to his stomach. There were layers on layers of intrigue here, everywhere lurking under the surface. And any one of them could engulf him. “Where is she?” he asked.

Rea gave him directions, and he left immediately. Down the tower, across the bridge, into Big Jasper. He was walking through a narrow alley before he realized that sneaking away might be dangerous. Might be a setup. How stupid was he? Someone had tried to kill him once already. He didn’t know Rea Siluz’s loyalties, and she had both
given him the problem (the existence of black cards) and the solution (visiting someone who might not exist, in a place far from safety).

He should go home right now. He should stop playing with Rea Siluz, and he should… What? Wait until he was a Blackguard? Ignore every summons from his grandfather? That wouldn’t work. The old man wouldn’t let Kip show him that kind of disrespect. Kip didn’t know what Andross Guile would do, but it would be bad. Very, very bad.

If only Gavin would come back. Gavin could protect him. Even though Kip had heard people say that Gavin was afraid of Andross Guile—that everyone was afraid of Andross Guile—it felt like Gavin could arrive and solve all of his problems in an instant. Kip could go back to being a child again.

A child tasked with destroying the Blue.

Orholam have mercy. Kip couldn’t count on anyone. He had to make the best of it. He had to go on.

It was late afternoon. The stars of this district had their light focused elsewhere. Here, the buildings were close, the shadows long. He looked over his shoulder.

Sure enough. A large, unkempt man was looming at the mouth of the alley. The man drew a knife from his belt. It was roughly the size of a sea demon.

Kip ran.

It was only twenty paces to the nearest lightwell. Kip skidded to a stop. He fumbled with his pocket, pulled out his spectacles as the big man charged after him. Put them on his face.

The big man pulled up short. Raised his hands. “Didn’t see you there, drafter, sir. Was just running, uh, home. No offense.”

Kip hadn’t even started drafting. In truth, he probably wouldn’t have had time to draft before the big man killed him.

But the man didn’t know that. He backed away, as if from a wild animal, then ran.

Just a thug. Just a thief. Nothing personal. No conspiracy. No assassination attempt.

And Kip hadn’t even thought of the fighting skills that Ironfist and Trainer Fisk had been beating into his skull. He looked down at his hands. His knuckles were chafed, fists bruised from constant use, and Kip had simply… forgotten it all. Hadn’t even occurred to him that he could fight.

He tucked his spectacles back in a pocket, and saw that the door in front of him was labeled:
Janus Borig, Demiurgos
.

He knocked and swore he saw dark-clad figures up several stories on either side of the alley bob out of nowhere quickly and disappear. He felt the weight of hidden eyes.

Jumpy, Kip. Jumpy.

An old woman opened the door. She was almost bald, and she was smoking a long pipe. Long nose, few teeth, a scattering of liver spots amid faded freckles. Her dress was besmirched with paint. She would have looked like a vagabond, but she wore a thick gold necklace that must have weighed a sev. She was wrinkly and ugly as afterbirth, but plainly vigorous, and there was such warmth in her features, Kip found himself grinning almost immediately.

“So. You’re the bastard,” she said. “Rea told me you’d come. Come in.”

The first thing Kip noticed about Janus Borig’s home was that it was home to the largest mess Kip had seen in his life. The mess had paws in every nook, had shed fur in every cranny. Piles of clothes like coughed-up hairballs hid the floor, and stacks of books stood like trees for the mess to mark its territory. The mess seemed to have little sense of human valuation, because old gnawed-on chicken bones shared floor space with strands of pearls and either jewels or colored glass close enough to jewels to fool Kip’s eyes.

The second thing he noticed was the guns. Janus Borig liked guns. There was one attached to the door, swiveling toward the peephole, in case Janus decided to kill a visitor rather than welcome him. But others were scattered everywhere, as if the mess had gotten into them and tossed them about. Pistols, the latest flintlock muskets, matchlocks, blunderbusses—there were handy ways to kill people everywhere.

“Don’t touch anything,” Janus said.

Which was impossible, thanks.

“Half the things in here will kill you if you nudge them wrong.”

Oh. Lovely.

She spun around and put something down on a shelf. It was a tiny pistol. She took a drag on her long pipe, contorted her lips into a quasi-smile, and blew smoke out of both sides of her mouth simultaneously. “Promise me something, bastard of the greatest Prism to ever live.”

She turned over her pipe and tapped out the ashes into a small pile of the same. She picked up another pistol, cocked it, and then used the spur of the hammer to scrape out the remaining ashes from her pipe. With every scrape, the cocked—and for all Kip knew, loaded—pistol rotated from being pointed at Kip’s forehead to being pointed at his groin.

To his left and right, there were piles; he couldn’t move anywhere without touching something.

“Uh, yes?” Kip said.

“Promise me you won’t kill me or report me to those who might.”

“I promise,” Kip said.

She sucked at her lips, making a squeaking sound, then spat. She put down the pistol and grabbed at a pile of tobacco, stuffed some in her pipe, eyeing Kip closely. He swore there was a pile of black powder right next to the pile of tobacco. She snatched a fuse cord from one of the matchlocks and stuck it onto the flame of a lantern, then used the fuse to light her pipe. “Swear it,” she said from behind a curtain of smoke.

“I swear,” Kip said.

“Again.”

“I
swear
.”

“And thus are you bound. Come with me,” she said.

Kip picked his way around piles that reached up to his knees. The woman wasn’t right.

He followed her upstairs. It was, apparently, her workroom. The division between the rooms was stark. The mess didn’t set one grubby paw beyond the stairs. There was no disorder here, none. Every surface was immaculate, all done in white marble with red veins. Jewelers’ lenses and hammers and chisels hung beside tiny brushes, special lanterns, palettes, and little jars of paint. One desk was slate, with little bits of chalk and an assortment of abacuses, large and small. An easel sat opposite, with a blank canvas on it, a magnifying lens in front of it.