The Blinding Knife (67 page)

Going back to the green cell was like going back to scoop up his own vomit and eat it. But back he went. Shivering with revulsion, he clambered through the hole he’d made and grabbed the husk of his blue bread.

He’d left all of the crust, broken open now to give him the maximum surface from which to draft.

He climbed back out of the green cell, but stood in its light. It took him another quarter of an hour to draft enough blue. It was a relief, though, when it came. The clarity of blue was a boon. He’d lived with blue for sixteen years, and he needed it. With the blue slowly filling him, he became aware once again of how fragile his health was. It had only been months since his fever had passed. The nasty cut across his chest had mostly healed in a nasty scar. His body had won the fight against the infection, but that didn’t mean he was up to full strength.

He didn’t know how long he had. He needed to blast the wall open,
draft green for the necessary strength, and go as fast and far as he could. Once he found a safe place, he could worry about healing. It was a gamble, and his blue self hated gambles, but this was a gamble he had to play or die.

He thought of going back to the stone wall to knock again, to double-check, but he didn’t need to. He’d drafted blue for so long that he could practically see lines overlaying his vision that denoted the exact outline of the hollow space. He could envision the probable thickness of the stone. It was granite, and from some class he’d taken as a boy and had thought long lost, he remembered how granite broke.

That was blue for you, dredging up details from your own mind that you couldn’t believe you remembered. Granite broke in predictable wedges, Xs at sixty degrees and one hundred twenty degrees. Of course, the blue couldn’t tell him at what angle those wedges lay to him. So he braced himself and grasped his right wrist in his left hand. He gathered his will. The first missile would need to be about the size of his thumb or the granite might not crack and show him the appropriate angles.

He took a deep breath and gave the short, sharp cry. It tightened stomach, chest, and diaphragm, gave tension and a stable firing platform, and a small animal boost to the will. Mechanics meets the beast.

The blue bullet burst from him and smashed into the wall, in and through with a small explosion of granite dust and granite shrapnel.

No alarm sounded. At least none that he could hear. Dazen strode to the wall. It was too dark to see the hole well, but he traced his fingers around it, felt the fractures. Aha, tilted about twelve degrees.

His blue-enhanced mind laid the lines out easily, compensated for the angles, picked out lines along which it would fracture, and exactly where he would have to shoot the next missiles to make the hole big enough to climb through.

Taking his place back far enough that he wouldn’t get hit with the shrapnel but would still easily hit his targets, Dazen braced himself, one foot back, turned, both hands up. Each hand would shoot two missiles simultaneously: there and… there.

He shouted, and the missiles blasted out from him, hitting the wall in a blue explosion as parts of the luxin were torn back into light. Dust filled the tunnel, and Dazen choked on it, feeling suddenly empty. He staggered over to the green cell and drew in liquid life.

Looking at the hunks of blue bread at his feet, he had the passing thought that he should draft in blue as well, at least some, some thread—he ate the bread. There’d be plenty more blue where he was going. He needed the strength.

A tiny part of him protested, but it was little, and weak.

He pushed through the dark hole into the dark tunnel. He drafted imperfect green into his hand. Green made lousy torches, and even in the state he was in, he knew not to use all of his luxin up just to make it slightly brighter.

The tunnel—Gavin’s tunnel—was simple, rough-hewn. It was a workspace, barely wide enough for a man. Not really wide enough for a man with a torch, if he didn’t want to risk burning the hell out of himself. Of course.

Gavin would have used a luxin torch. Bastard.

Dazen hesitated once inside the tunnel. One way might gently slope up, and the other seemed to gently slope down, but he couldn’t be certain. His instinct was to choose the upward direction, but when he thought about it rationally, there was no guarantee that simply because this one tiny section of tunnel had a slope that the slope continued all the way to the surface. Really, he had no idea which way was out. If he went the wrong way, of course, he could simply turn around, but he’d be wasting time. Time that might be valuable. And he’d certainly be wasting energy, and even with the green alive inside him, he knew his bucket had holes in the bottom of it. He was emaciated, unhealthy underneath the veneer of wild energy green lent him. So he forced himself to hold still, wait.

The blue saved him. He wasn’t drafting it, but it had changed him in all those years. He stayed still and held his meager green light. The granite dust, still settling from the explosion and still settling from his own passage into the tunnel, now resumed its natural patterns.

There was a slight breeze between the two newly connected passages, too slight for Dazen to feel on his skin, but enough to see the dust slide into the tunnel and… up. If the wind was blowing that way, that was the way that was open. That was his way out.

Dazen went up. Up was good. Up was out.

A sudden sob racked his frame. Up was out. Dear gods. Up was out.

“Here’s what I’m curious about,” Teia said as they sat down in Kip’s room. She was tired and her hair was askew from training with Karris White Oak. “I think Aram is the second best fighter in the scrubs.”

“He’s the tall kid, muscular?” Kip asked.

“And fast. And a yellow/green bichrome. He’s gotten some unlucky matchups, but I’m wondering if he’s playing sand spider.”

“Sand spider?” Kip asked. She’d said it like it was a saying he should know.

“Hiding in his hole so he can jump out at exactly the right time. He is a yellow. Maybe he thinks that he’s another Ayrad.”

“When you use one reference I don’t know to explain another I don’t know…” Kip said.

“Ayrad was a Blackguard seventy, eighty years ago now. He entered at the bottom of his class, at forty-nine, and each month at testing, he barely made it into the next month. Forty-nine, to thirty-five, to twenty-eight, to fourteen. And then on the last week, he beat
everyone
. Turned out he’d taken a vow or something.”

“So on the last week, he fought, what? Fourteen to eleven, eleven to eight, eight to five, five to two, and two to one? Orholam’s balls, that’s a lot of fights. I can’t imagine facing the best guy in the class after having already fought four times.” It was one of the controls that the tests had built in. Someone could technically fight from the last place to the first, but because they had to fight again immediately until they stopped winning fight tokens, the exhaustion piled on—and with each new fight, the challenger would be facing someone who was fresh.

“Kip, Ayrad didn’t skip fighters. He beat all of them. From fourteen, he challenged thirteen, from thirteen, twelve.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s the story.” Teia shrugged. “Karris did almost what you said, until she faced Fisk. She finished third, after four fights. And Fisk barely got her, they say.”

With all his study of magic and history and the cards, Kip almost despaired as he saw that there was another gigantic area of lore that he hadn’t even touched: the histories of the great Blackguards.

Teia picked up Kip’s slate and began writing on it.

“So how did Lucretia Verangheti take it when she lost you?” Kip asked. “I never even heard how the Red got her to give up your title.”

“I don’t know,” Teia said. “I haven’t seen her since then. Don’t want to.” She shrugged, then pointed to the slate quickly. “This is what I think the true ranking of the Blackguard scrubs should be. What do you think?”

There was something about how she’d glossed over her slavery that caught Kip’s attention, but then he got caught up in looking at the slate. Teia had Cruxer at first, Aram at second (second?), herself at twelfth, and Kip at… eighteenth. He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Um, sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could do better than that.”

“You’re apologizing for the wrong thing,” Kip said. “I don’t belong at eighteenth, do I?” He’d put himself around twentieth.

Teia cleared her throat. “You’re a polychrome, Kip. It makes a big difference. Huge, if you use it right.”

Kip scowled. A polychrome. They’d guessed that for a while. A full-spectrum polychrome? That was different. Totally different. And yet, with missing the practicum every day, he didn’t have nearly the skills he should have. In truth, as Teia had told him, if he really was a full-spectrum polychrome, all sorts of things would be different. They wouldn’t let him be a Blackguard unless Gavin intervened—he was too valuable. And they would want him to marry, young. It still wasn’t understood what made drafters, but enough people believed that drafters had children who could draft that the pressure for drafters to have children was intense. And more intense for the more gifted. Unless you got as powerful as Gavin Guile, and you could do whatever you wanted and everyone else could go to hell.

But he didn’t want to think about all that right now. He went back to looking at the rankings. “How’d you even arrive at this?”

“Paying attention? Watching? First you have to take into account that everyone wants to finish as high as possible, but at least in the top fourteen. People also have friends that they don’t want to knock out of the top fourteen, so lots of times people won’t challenge three up from themselves if that’s where their friend is. Because win or lose, either they or their friend will lose their challenge token. That’s less important in the top ten where people will know they’re safe, but people heading for getting kicked out aren’t going to want to ruin their friends’ chances.” She started drawing lines. “Person at the bottom goes first, so they might challenge the weakest person in the three
above them. So let’s say Idus at twenty challenges Asmun at eighteen because even though he is allowed to challenge Ziri at seventeen, he thinks he can beat Asmun and not Ziri. If he wins, he moves up and then takes on Winsen, hoping to get lucky. So now the new person at twenty is more likely to challenge Asmun who is now at nineteen, even though that’s only one place up.”

“Why?” Kip asked. The numbers were spinning in his head.

“Because Asmun’s already lost. He’s got no challenge token, so he knows he can’t make it in this season at all. He won’t fight as hard because there’s nothing at stake. See, you have to reshuffle the order every time someone wins, and keep track of who has and who doesn’t have their challenge token. That way you can skip the more difficult fights. But of course, we have to keep in mind that some people will feign weaknesses until the last week so they have an advantage.”

“Like you.” That was why Teia had wanted Kip to take credit for the courier idea.

“Yes, like me.”

“Oh hell no,” Kip said. Talk about vast areas of lore he knew nothing about. “No, no, no, this is hopeless. I can’t figure this all out!” He stood up. “No, I’m tired. Forget this—”

“Kip, if you don’t figure this out, you’re not going to make it into the Blackguard. You’re not a good enough fighter, so you need to be smarter than people who are better fighters than you.
That
is what people admired about Ayrad.”

“The man who defeated all the other fighters in the Blackguard wasn’t admired because he was a good fighter? I find that hard to believe.”

“Kip, he was able to figure out exactly how to finish last every month and still make it in. That means he was figuring exactly who would challenge whom and who would win those fights—every month. If he figured wrong once, he would have failed out early.”

“So he’s admired for losing intelligently? That’s mad.”

“He’s admired for knowing his friends and knowing his enemies and outwitting them all.”

“So what happened to him?” Kip asked.

“He became commander of the Blackguard and saved the lives of four different Prisms over the course of his career—and then someone poisoned him.”

“So he wasn’t perfect,” Kip said grumpily.

“He was perfect for twenty-four years. That’s a lot longer than most of us can even dream.”

“Sorry,” Kip said. He could tell that somehow the dead commander meant a lot to Teia.

“Don’t pout. We’ve got work to do.”

“Hold on, before we do all that, I want you to take your papers. You keep on avoiding this. Look, all you have to do is sign them and we can take them to be registered tomorrow.”

“Kip, don’t be an idiot.”

Kip was so tired he wanted to cry. He lifted his hands helplessly.

“What happens after you free me, Kip?”

“Uh, you’re free?”

“And poor.”

“Didn’t we already talk about this?” Kip asked.

“What happens when a slave gets into the Blackguard, Kip?”

“They’re freed, sort of.”

“They’re purchased, for a fortune. And as soon as a scrub passes the test, their contract goes into escrow until final vows. If you free me now, you get nothing.”