The Blinding Knife (84 page)

As usual, Liv woke next to Zymun. It was early, and the young man’s breath was even, regular. He was a heavy sleeper. Their tent wasn’t large, barely tall enough to stand in, and they slept on piles of furs and blankets on the ground. Liv rolled over, careful not to disturb
Zymun. He insisted she sleep naked, and sometimes he liked to start his day the way he liked to end it. It was flattering to be desired so much, but sometimes she thought she simply happened to be the most convenient way to sate his hungers.

She blinked, aware of some change in the atmosphere, a freer brush of the wind than a closed tent should allow.

The Color Prince stood outlined against the morning light in front of the open tent flap. He held up a finger so she didn’t speak and wake Zymun. He motioned that she was to come with him.

A wave of shame went through her. She felt like a whore, caught by her father with a boy she didn’t even love. The feelings crested, and she quickly drafted superviolet. It was like the first puff of ratweed in the morning, except the luxin made her think more clearly. The feelings were the vestiges of small-town religiosity. Besides, the Color Prince believed in freedom, free choices. She was young. She could do whatever she wanted. There was no need to feel shame here.

She stood, briefly forgetting in the superviolet rush that she was naked. Koios White Oak looked at her frankly, and she soaked up his regard as boldly as if it were light itself. She waited a long second until she saw the twinge of regret hit him, and moved as soon as she saw it, gathering up her shift and pulling on her dress so that he might think she hadn’t seen it. There were other kinds of power than magic and the sword. But some power works best in silence.

In silence, she dressed in her most practical dress and held her long dark hair out of the way. The Color Prince buttoned the last buttons for her, then she followed him out into the camp.

As the Blood Robes had marched on, rolling over town after town, their ranks had swollen. Liv was never sure how many of those who joined them believed in their cause, or if they merely believed in victory and plunder. She wanted to despise those who joined out of convenience, but she was using superviolet too much to be more than coolly amused most of the time. Besides, men believe in power, and what is victory but the demonstration of power?

Parts of her still mourned it, but everywhere she looked, she saw that the Color Prince was right. Power. All human interactions came down to power.

The Color Prince gave sermons every day, and he had disciples now, both drafters and munds, who wrote down every word and did their best to make a coherent system of it all. He talked about Dazen
coming back and championing their cause. He talked about freedom. He talked about the tributes they all paid to the Chromeria. Though his words melded politics and religion and history and civics and science, Liv thought she discerned less of an incredibly nuanced system underneath his rhetoric, and more of a belief created simply by the strength of his believers’ faith that it must be rational, or their great leader wouldn’t profess it. She couldn’t tell how much of it the Omnichrome believed, but she knew that if he was going to accomplish his great purposes, he needed loyal followers. And those followers needed something to believe in, to unify them.

He didn’t preach to the mob about power, just as he didn’t allow them to call him Koios. Familiarity and knowledge both were for the privileged. Sometimes Liv thought the Color Prince probably didn’t give a damn what all the people believed, that he tapped the heresies he tapped because he figured he might as well exploit every resentment against the Chromeria.

“Have you figured out your great purpose yet, Aliviana?” the prince asked. He nodded to a group of green wights who barely stirred at his presence. Greens weren’t much good at veneration either.

“Aside from bait for my father?”

“I told you from the beginning you were that, and no, I haven’t given up all hope for Corvan. But a hostage needn’t be given privileges or the freedom you have. Surely you’ve gone past that.”

“I’m the best superviolet you’ve got. It has something to do with that,” Liv said.

“A broad guess,” the prince said. “But not long ago you would have said ‘one of the best.’ ” He seemed amused.

“I’ve changed,” she said. She was more confident now; she had cut away the Chromeria’s false humility. “And I’m right.”

“Mmm.”

The Red Cliffs loomed above the whole camp. There were spidery trails everywhere up those cliffs, but the prince had opted to send almost everyone along the coastal road. Only his cavalry had traveled along the high road, foraging and ready to put down any armed resistance.

The army was big enough now that some days there were skirmishes that Liv didn’t even find out about until after dark. The Atashian army had probed the Blood Robes for weakness, but with the number of drafters the prince had, they hadn’t found much.
Zymun had speculated, though, that they were going to find out how much steel was in the Atashians’ spines soon. The army was to reach the narrowest pass between sheer cliffs and the ocean tomorrow.

“Are they going to crush us at the Gates of Sand?” Liv asked.

“No,” the prince said.

“Really? Zymun thought that was the best chance they had of stopping us before we get to the grasslands around Ru.”

“It was. But you need naval support to hold the Gates, and our Ilytian allies crushed the Atashian navy five days ago.”

Liv hadn’t even heard a whisper of that. “Ilytian allies? But the Ilytians don’t believe in anything.”

“They believe in gold.” The Color Prince gave a grim smile. Together, they climbed up an exposed rock promontory. The soldiers standing there snapped salutes. The prince reached the top and did something with his eyes. He expelled a disappointed breath. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

“My lord?”

“Close your eyes, Liv. Can you feel it?”

She closed her eyes and tried to feel. She felt the coolness of the morning, smelled the latrines, the campfires, the cooking meat, her own body. She felt the hummingbird weight of light on her skin, light as a wind, passing in soft billows from the rising sun. She heard the sergeants calling out to training men, the clash of sticks on armor, the neighing of horses, the laugh of a woman, the tread of feet. She heard the faintly unnatural hiss of the Color Prince’s breath.

Opening her eyes, she looked over to the man who was shaking the world to its foundations. Shook her head, disappointed in herself.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow maybe you’ll see it. Go now, and send up Dervani Malargos and Jerrosh Green.”

They were the two best green drafters the Blood Robes had, the teachers for every green who hadn’t yet broken the halo. Liv went down and called for them. They seemed to be waiting, and the two of them went up on the promontory.

Liv watched them as the prince spoke to them, wondering if they would see or feel what she had not, wondering if she was failing in some way.

“Good morning, beautiful. Always with the tests and mysteries, huh?” Zymun said, coming up beside her. He put a possessive arm around her. Sometimes that annoyed her, but she’d been worried
yesterday that Zymun was already losing interest in her, so she said nothing.

“I suppose,” she said. “It’s not capricious, though.”

“You think,” Zymun said. He was the only person Liv knew who dared to speak derisively of anything the Color Prince did. At first she’d wondered at that, but a little yellow and superviolet meditation had made it plain: Zymun was jealous. He felt threatened, less of a man around the most powerful man in all the world.

That was the mystery to her.

“So what was it today?” Zymun asked.

“Asked me if I saw something. I didn’t.”

“Looks like they didn’t either,” Zymun said, nodding toward Dervani and Jerrosh. “Those two hate each other, and both want to lead the greens. As if the greens can be led. Idiots and fools.”

The men were bickering, faces turning red, furious. Liv could almost make out the words from here. But she watched the Color Prince instead. From the set of his overlarge shoulders, she could tell he was furious himself, though nothing else betrayed it. He raised one hand, as the people in the camp around seemed torn between watching and not being caught watching.

The two greens stopped abruptly. The Color Prince said something else, and they both dropped to their knees, apologizing. Odd to see a green on its knees.

Its.
She’d thought
its
knees, not
his
knees. Wasn’t that curious? Another remnant of my childish beliefs, that a person ceases to be a person when he breaks the halo. Our very language has been corrupted to make the murder of drafters palatable.

The Color Prince drew a pistol and shot Jerrosh Green between the eyes.

A spray of blood, atomized, drifted to the ground slower than the chunks of red-gray brain matter liberated from their bony home via lead. Jerrosh Green’s body dropped backward and tumbled down the bare rock of the promontory. The camp was suddenly silent. Pistol still smoking, the prince bound a slender choker with a black jewel on it on Dervani’s neck. He gestured for Dervani to stand.

The drafter stood and left without a word.

“Funny thing is,” Zymun said, “I still can’t tell which of those two is more brainless.”

She looked at Zymun from deep within the grip of superviolet—she
hadn’t even noticed drafting it again, but now it was like a friend to her—and realized that the boy wasn’t hard and callous. At least he wasn’t only those. He was terrified. He was imagining his own brain painting the rocks.

He looked at her, and she saw in his eyes that he feared her, too. He was tiring of her, but not out of boredom or for her lack of enthusiasm under the blankets. He didn’t want an equal; he wanted to be worshipped. Zymun was far more dangerous than she had realized. She would need to be rid of him, but carefully, cleverly, so he thought it was his own idea.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said. She dropped the superviolet. He could sometimes tell by her voice when she was drafting it. “I don’t know how you can see that and not be afraid.” The shudder she let through wasn’t wholly feigned. It also wasn’t the shudder of desire she hoped he thought it was. She turned her eyes to his and moistened her lips and said softly, “Take me back to our tent. Right now.”

The big guns on the
Gargantua
’s top deck belched flame and smoke, the sight of hell’s bounty outracing its sound. Two jets of water, fifty paces ahead of the skimmer, announced the miss an instant before the roar of the cannon revealed it had even been fired.

One of the guns on the second deck went off next, and Gavin shouted, “Now!”

Around the skimmer, Kip saw that the Blackguards were grouped into pairs, one at the reeds and one archer. Each team’s archer had a rope in hand, and starting at the outside teams, they pulled.

Before Kip realized what was happening, the skimmer split, each team suddenly freed, one driver and one archer, the sea chariots breaking off from the skimmer smoothly and multiplying their force instantly. Two, four, six, and eight split off, leaving only Gavin and Ironfist and Kip on the now much smaller skimmer in the center.

The water behind them cratered and jetted as Kip heard the roar of
the cannon again. Then it seemed the world turned to cannon fire. The
Gargantua
loomed larger and larger and the eight skimmers cut the waves with perfect grace, none so close to the others that a single cannon shell could hit two of them.

The seas were rough today, so Kip was glad that his father had made supports, both up behind his back so he wouldn’t tumble off the stern and also handles so he could brace himself. Kip saw that the deck of the
Gargantua
was actually open, contrary to what Gavin had expected, but then, even in the few seconds that Kip was watching, the great wooden screens that were the blindages were brought down by scrambling sailors. Seen in sub-red through Kip’s spectacles, the men glowed as if lit from within, still clearly visible despite the screen.

The skimmer cut hard to port and Kip barely caught himself. He didn’t see any danger, but he decided that even as he was scanning the big ship and trying to keep an eye out for more distant dangers, he should copy his father’s and Ironfist’s stance. Each man had his legs set wide and knees bent, keeping his weight low.

The great rudder of the
Gargantua
turned hard, and the lumbering great ship, sails full, began to turn. Along the broadside, Kip could see gunports snapping open, on at least three different levels. Not all at once, but as each crew was ready.

There were a
lot
of guns.

From the nearest crow’s nest, a ball of luxin the size of a cat arced out.

“Drafter! First crow’s nest!” Kip called out.

The luxin ball split in midair and ignited. It landed on the water only a dozen feet from the starboard side in a curtain of flame—and floated, flames two feet high.

The first sea chariot cut hard to port, nearly plastering itself against the
Gargantua
’s hull. The next must not have seen the fire in the swelling of the waves, but those same swells saved it as the swells and the
Gargantua
’s wake made a ramp that flung the chariot into the air and neatly over the fire.