The Broken Eye (6 page)

“We’re the blood of Guile,” Zymun said. “But you’ll forever be a bastard. I’ll prove myself to grandfather, and be an heir. The heir.”

Kip rowed. “You’re sure?” he asked. “About Karris being your mother? I never heard so much as a whisper.” He hated being blindfolded, having to sift Zymun’s tones of voice rather than look for the momentary grimaces or twitches that might betray the truth.

“She was betrothed to the Prism when they conceived me. That makes me legitimate, to most people. When he broke their betrothal, she went and stayed with relations.”

“In
Tyrea
?” Kip asked. That was where he’d first seen Zymun, defying his master, throwing fireballs at Kip, and forcing Kip to jump off the waterfall.

“Blood Forest. Little town called Apple Grove. I went to Tyrea later. It was the only place to go to learn drafting that wasn’t the Chromeria.”

“Grandfather’s idea?” Kip asked. It sounded like Andross Guile. Have the boy educated, trained, and kept off the table. A perfect hidden card. While being honed into the perfect weapon, Zymun would also be kept from developing his own allies at the Chromeria. He would be perfect for Andross’s use against Gavin or the Spectrum, but he wouldn’t be a threat to Andross himself. The boy didn’t even realize how cynically Andross was using him.

Guess I’ve become a little cynical myself, to see it so clearly. Or maybe I’m only cynical where Andross Guile is concerned.

Regardless, Zymun didn’t answer. Or perhaps he answered by nodding.

In two days, Zymun had never asked about Karris. He seemed to think her position on the Blackguard made her acceptable to have as a mother, but not intrinsically powerful, and therefore not interesting. He saved his questions to arm himself for his meeting with Andross Guile. Kip wished he could be there to see that.

The next time Kip’s oar slipped off a wave, he coughed hard. He wheezed into his hand and pushed the blindfold up his nose fractionally. Coughing, even fake coughing, hurt like hell. He’d inhaled a lot of seawater after he’d jumped into the Cerulean Sea to save Gavin Guile.

He’d once thought of himself as the turtle-bear, made with a special gift for absorbing punishment. He was really going to have to come up with some other special gift. This one was terrible.

He went back to rowing. Zymun had made him strip off his shirt, both so he could see if Kip tried to pack luxin, and to keep himself warm. With the cloud cover and the autumn wind, it was chilly for much of the morning and evening. Rowing and sweating, Kip didn’t notice the lack so much.

At the end of each stroke, his head naturally tilting back, Kip took a tiny sip of blue under the blindfold. In the weak, gray, cloud-filtered light, the sea was soup, and his eyelashes and the blindfold blotted out most color, but he didn’t need much. Couldn’t take much at once, or Zymun might see it. With only a little at a time, Kip’s skin was dark enough to camouflage the luxin as it traveled from his eyes, through his face hidden by the blindfold, down his back, and was packed beneath the skin of his legs and butt, out of sight. Zymun had checked his scalp and the skin hidden by the blindfold a few times, so an abundance of caution was in order.

Now, certain that Kip wouldn’t draft, Zymun expected him to attack at night, when his own powers were weakest. But as a full-spectrum polychrome, Kip knew weakness wasn’t measured in colors. There was no difference between Zymun having a dozen sure ways to kill him and only having one, if time was limited enough. In fact, if Zymun could be more easily surprised because he had a dozen ways to kill Kip than if he’d had only one, then those extra ways actually made him weaker.

Some people think that you play Nine Kings against the man, not the cards. It sounds clever, but it’s rarely true.

By late afternoon, Kip had enough luxin. It took all of his concentration to row and push his pain aside and slowly thread the luxin up his back, up the back of his neck, up into his scalp. To draft luxin, it had to be connected to blood. Most drafters chose to tear open the skin at their wrists or under their fingernails. After a while, scar tissue formed; the body adjusted. But you didn’t
have
to push the luxin through a spot where you’d done it before, and Kip didn’t intend to. Every fraction of a second lost made death more likely.

The sips of blue made it all seem so logical. Kip’s senses were acute, filtering out the wind and his own heaving breath. He divined that Zymun was seated facing him. Kip knew where the bench was, could tell that Zymun was seated in the middle of it from how the rowboat sat even in the water. He could hear Zymun shift from time to time, looking behind them or to shore.

The blue couldn’t mute sounds, though, only sift them. The irregular wind obliterated much of the information Kip could have used. Nor did blue mute all his body’s agony. Kip had husbanded his dwindling resources as carefully as possible, acting slightly more exhausted than he was so that he could grab a moment of rest between each oar stroke—balancing Zymun’s laziness against his own life.

It had to be today. It had to be soon. He didn’t have much strength left.

Kip hunched, grunted in pain, and released the oars, faking a leg cramp. The move was sudden enough it probably almost earned him a musket ball between the eyes. He massaged his leg with both hands, evaluating, testing, stretching not just his legs, but his hands and arms, too.

There was a sudden snort and a small cry.

Planting his legs wider than he had before, making them less helpful for rowing, but hopefully more helpful for a sudden leap, Kip settled back into his place, groped blindly for the oars. He pretended he hadn’t noticed, but he died a little.

Zymun must have just dozed off. Kip had woken his enemy. With blue sharpening his senses, if Kip had waited even a few moments …

He hadn’t. That was no use. Commander Ironfist had told them, ‘Looking back doesn’t help. Dwell on your mistakes when you’re in safety.
Get
to safety first.’

“If you think I’m going to help you, you’re insane,” Zymun said.

Kip groaned from the pain of moving his arms. He didn’t know if he would have the strength even to lurch across the boat. He groped around blindly, missing the oars that he’d released. He said, “Longer I fumble around for the oars, the longer I get to rest.”

“Right hand. Up and forward. Up more. Use the chain, stupid.”

The oar, held in its oar lock, bobbed and swayed with the action of the waves. It smacked Kip’s fingernails. Kip grunted. He bent his wrist to reach the manacle, and followed the chain to the oar. He hadn’t forgotten about it. But it was better to look stupid.

It was better not to look like he was calculating exactly how long that chain was. Kip grabbed the oar. Then he repeated with his left hand, and he started rowing again.

“More to port,” Zymun said, bored. “That’s it.”

There was only one way this could work. Kip had to knock Zymun into the water and not fall in himself. Once Zymun fell in the water, his pistol would be useless. He would only have time to throw one burst of something at Kip. Because all luxin had weight, that action—regardless of which color of luxin he chose to throw—would cause the reaction of pushing Zymun deep under the waves.

If Zymun missed with that first strike, Kip had a chance. He would have to row like mad. When he was able to see how far from shore they were, he could decide whether to risk going back and killing Zymun, or leaving him to his fate in the sea. After Zymun’s impossible escape through shark-filled waters last time, Kip planned to kill him and be sure.

If Kip was too slow, though, he’d get shot. With no idea what direction to row, and as weak as he was, he would die. If he knocked them both into the water, he would die. Zymun was the better swimmer even when Kip was healthy.

There would be only one slim chance. Kip would be ready for it. His eyes, shielded from the light under the blindfold, were naturally wide, dilated. He tried to narrow them consciously, a trick any experienced drafter could do instantly. If he was dazzled by the light, he’d miss. If—

Zymun’s weight shifted. “Orholam,” he said.

The moment was on him so suddenly, Kip almost missed it.

“A galley,” Zymun said. The blue luxin Kip was holding told him that Zymun’s voice was muted by being turned to the side, looking. “I think it’s pirates.”

Now!
Blue luxin tore through Kip’s skin at his temples. With fingers of blue luxin, he flipped the blindfold off his head—and leapt.

Chapter 4

“I smell so much as a resiny fart, and I paints my deck chunky, little Guile. Red and gray and bony, you elucidate? I know luxinly smells,” Gunner said as he led him onto the deck of the
Bitter Cob
. “Or more like, I paint it all in brown and squashy, right, right?”

Gavin walked into the light with a lead heart.

“Right,” he said. Because he had feces for brains. Funny.

“Luxinly? Luxic? Luxinic?” Gunner asked. The man loved language the way a wife beater loves his wife.

“Luxiny, but I like your way better.”

“Bah.”

It was close to noon, choppy seas tossing the light galley more than he expected. These Angari ships were different. But what had been the most salient fact of his whole life—the light—struck him as insignificant. It was an overcast day, but with lots of light for a Prism. But this light kissed his skin like a lingering lover leaving. The hues of gray and white and black gave him despair where before the scintillant spectra had given him inconceivable power. He’d thought he’d adjusted to the loss of his colors, but it was one thing to face his loss in the darkness of a prison, another thing altogether to see that his prison was the whole world. And Gunner knew it. He had taken one look at Gavin’s eyes the night he’d captured him and he’d known.

So why is Gunner paranoid now?

Because he’s Gunner.

“On yer knobbies,” Gunner said.

Gavin got on his knees, planting them wide on the deck so the rolling motion wouldn’t knock him down. He couldn’t tell if the stretching hurt good or hurt bad, but as long as he didn’t lose his head or any other limb more important to him, any break from the oars was a good thing.

Gunner looked at him. “What happened to Gavin Guile, levering the world on the fulcrum of his wantings?”

On one level, this was the clearest thing Gunner had said to him yet, but Gavin had told Gunner he wasn’t Gavin. It was probably one of the dumber things he’d done in the last year, though there were a lot of contenders for that crown. “He died.” That ought to work, regardless of which Gavin Gunner meant.

“Tragical. How?”

The trick to working with the insane was never to profess surprise. Nor to expect it. Opacity was a dagger Gavin could wield, too. “I ran out of mercies until I had only the musket-ball mercy left. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Boom boom. Meatsack mercy. Yellow cell red, liver made dead.”

Gunner folded his arms. He looked at Gavin like he was very puzzling. “You rave.”

“I crave.”

“You knave.”

“I slave.”

“I save.”

“From waves?”

“And you gave,” Gunner said. He gestured to his big white musket, propped against a doorframe some paces away.

Gavin stopped to let Gunner win. He did want to get a better look at that odd thing, but Gunner alternately wanted to show it off and looked paranoid that someone was going to steal it. Gavin couldn’t pay too much attention to what Gunner treasured. Nor too little.

Gunner laughed, sealing his win, taking Gavin’s hesitation to be a concession of defeat. They’d played this game before. Years and years ago now. If Gavin weren’t utterly in the man’s power, and Gunner utterly insane, Gavin thought he might like him. Gunner said, “I don’t take men who’ve been in Ceres’s bosom too sincere. Them watery kisses make men crazy, and ain’t no Guile started out overmuch sane. Tell it straight as shooting. Are you Dazen Guile, back from the dead? You tell me this, and not half the tale.”

Which didn’t mean what the words meant. Gunner’s patience was shorter than his fuses. So Gavin gave it in brief: “Never died. Captured my brother at Sundered Rock, and took his place. His friends looked better than mine, so I took my brother’s clothes, and I took his place. But not a month back, I decided my imprisoned brother had gone frothing mad, and I killed him.”

It was so simple to say the words. Gavin had thought it would be impossible to tell the truth he’d worked so hard to hide for so long. But he felt nothing. He should feel something, shouldn’t he?

“The sea she sends me mysteries to invigorate,” Gunner said.

Gavin was sure, this time, that Gunner had used the wrong word on purpose. “You’re quite an invigorator. No wonder you’re Ceres’s favorite.”

Gunner spat into the water, but Gavin could tell he was pleased. “You’re
Dazen
? Straight bullseye?”

“I been shootin’ in the dark so long I ain’t sure what I am, now. I
was
Dazen, though. Straight shootin’.” Gavin wasn’t sure why he did that, dropping into patter when he spoke with others who did so. He’d always done it, though, copying accents and odd phrasing when he spent too long in any one place.

“You say this because you know Gunner worked for Dazen,” Gunner said. “You’re lying. Hoping to edge with me.”

Hoping to edge?—oh, hoping to gain an edge. “Sure. And before I killed my brother, he told me your birth name was Uluch Assan. You were so very important to him, those were his last words.”

Gunner’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Not impossible for a Prism to learn an old name.”

“Before you agreed to work for me—me Dazen—all those years ago, you told me lies about how you killed that sea demon as we sat in the slaves’ quarters drinking that foul peach liquor. And when you professed to believe that there was no such thing as superviolet luxin, we played a little game with a feather to quell your doubts.”

A worried look crossed the pirate captain’s face. “Took Gunner three shots to hit that damned dancing feather. Was an eagle feather, though, not quail.”

There was no point correcting him, so Gavin continued, “I feared I’d made you so furious that you wouldn’t work for me. I let you hit it … on the sixth shot, ya damned liar.”