The Broken Eye (9 page)

Kip bobbed in the water for a few more moments. He couldn’t swim. His arms were lead weights, and though his legs weren’t yet dead, they would be soon. His fat would make him float if he didn’t panic, but floating wasn’t going to get him away from Zymun, much less the pirate galley. Kip looked around for it, but from the water, he couldn’t see the ship.

And it wasn’t going to have any problem finding them, not with the bonfire Zymun had made of their boat.

Oh. Simple.

Kip drew in as much blue as he could hold and drafted reeds around his hands. The reeds let water stream past his fingers, then he shot luxin through the reeds, pushing the water out. Like the kick of a musket, by pushing water back, it pushed you forward. Kip drafted the reeds to brace under his armpits, took a deep gulp of air, and pointed his head for shore.

Best of all, Zymun had never seen it.

He moved far more slowly than Gavin Guile had when he’d fought the sea demon. Kip knew he was doing something wrong, but he didn’t know what. But the speed was still three or four times faster than he would have been able to swim. And soon, he realized his relative lack of speed was a blessing. He wasn’t cutting a wake in the water that would mark his location for the pirates.

An hour later—or maybe it only felt so long—Kip staggered onto shore. He had to get to the cover of the trees. If he collapsed in sight of the galley and fell asleep, it would all be for nothing. So he walked, shoeless feet making the sun-bright sand squeak. The Atashian coast was littered with beautiful beaches like this. Palm trees swayed silently. He made his way to the shade and finally turned to look back for Zymun.

The burning boat was gone, sunk, even the black smoke dissipating. The galley had reached the spot where it had been, though. Kip didn’t know much about galleys, but this one was small. Perhaps thirty paces long. Hard to tell at this distance, though. They flew no flag. Not Gunner’s galley.

They had stopped, though, and Kip saw men throwing a line into the water on the far side of the boat.

So Zymun was alive. Kip’s heart sank. If Kip had been captured by pirates—or even regular sailors—he would have been worried about being pressed into slavery. He would have thought he only had the slimmest of chances. For Zymun, he had no such fears or hopes. Zymun would probably be captain of that galley before the week was out.

Orholam strike him. Orholam blind him. Orholam take the light from him in life and in death.

Kip was safe, though, for the moment. He needed water. Then food. Then a way home. But nothing would stand in his way. These were trifles. His life was a trifle. But his message was not. The men and women on the ship that night had seen Gavin Guile plunge overboard after being run through with a sword. They had to believe him dead. Kip knew better, and only Kip knew that Gunner had him.

And should the gods themselves stand against him, Kip was going to get his father back.

Chapter 7

The pistol was useless. Worse, Zymun had thrown it away in a fit of pique in the water. He floated, watching the pirate ship bear down on him. They thought they’d make him a slave, no doubt. They’d try, no doubt.

He couldn’t help but smile. There are so few real chances in life to kill without consequences.

He would have liked to have access to more colors, but blue would have to suffice. He packed the blue luxin into his shoulders and back where it would be covered by the sleeves of his tunic. He wasn’t good at packing luxin. It was uncomfortable, and he never fully cleared his skin; he always retained a pale blue hue, like he was freezing to death. He could do a thousand things excellently, but hiding his excellence wasn’t one of them.

The burning rowboat finally had enough of its hull consumed that it dipped the last smoldering beam in the waves with a hiss. He hoped the pirates wouldn’t wonder how a rowboat could produce so much smoke. Maybe they’d think he’d been carrying tar or black powder.

At least it looked like Kip was dead. Zymun had never heard or seen him after the boat exploded, and he didn’t think the boy had gotten clear. He himself had ducked under the water to avoid the force and shrapnel from the blast. Sad to have lost his boat. He should have known Kip would try something. Slippery, and quicker than you’d think a blindfolded big kid could move.

It didn’t matter. The pirates would scoop him out of the water, and would have whether he’d been in the boat or not. He had only to wait. The swimming was no problem; in Apple Grove where he’d grown up, every boy and girl swam for fun, jumping off the big rope swing or riding the smooth stones of the waterfall.

In minutes, the galley arrived. They threw a line to him, then tossed webbing over the side and a toothless sailor shouted at him to climb.

What else am I going to do, you cretin? Stay in the water?

Zymun climbed. He hopped over the railing, spry, ignoring the drawn swords four men held pointed at him. No one had drawn a musket. Good. He kept his eyes down, though, waiting to see who would speak.

“Young,” the mate said. He was the toothless man, and as ugly as a day at the oar was long. “Skinny, but not too soft. And at his age, he’ll toughen up fast. He’ll do nicely. Trench was coughing blood yesterday. Give us a chance to rest him. Orholam smiles on us.”

“You’re going to enslave me?” Zymun asked, his tone that of a scared boy’s.

The captain spoke up. He was a braided-beard Atashian, though with brown eyes rather than that people’s usual blue. “Enslave is such a hard term. We all work here. Doesn’t Orholam say all men are brothers? You’ll work beside your brothers on an oar.”

“And if I refuse?” Zymun asked. He let the blue luxin travel down the underside of his arm. With his hands at his side, it would be all but invisible.

“We all work,” the captain said flatly. “My ship, my world.”

Zymun could make his proposal now. Could reveal that he was a polychrome. This captain didn’t seem terribly belligerent. He hadn’t struck Zymun, despite chances to do so.

“I have a better idea,” Zymun said. “How about—” He shot a spike of blue luxin through the face of the man nearest him. The sharp luxin went straight through the man’s aquiline nose and into his brain. Zymun spun with the kick of having shot so much mass, using the spin to flick out another blade of blue luxin. He lopped off the other man’s hand at the wrist. He shot a blunt rock of blue luxin into that man’s chest, knocking him off his feet. In an instant, Zymun had another seething spike spinning slowly in his left hand, pointing it at the captain.

His actions, so sudden and swift, and so swiftly stopped, stunned the slavers. They didn’t react, and Zymun didn’t move. If he did, he’d spook them. If the whole ship attacked him, he might be able to kill everyone, but he couldn’t command this ship. He didn’t know how it worked. He took advantage of the pause to replenish his luxin.

“How about,” Zymun repeated, “I join your crew for a time? I’m a polychrome, Captain. This, this was me using one color. I can use six. You give me the mate’s room, and I’ll fight with you for three months, or three battles, whichever is first. My magic will make all the difference. Three battles that you’re guaranteed to win. Then, when I’ve paid you in full, you take me to Big Jasper and let me debark with the share of the treasure that you think I’ve earned. You’ll still be the captain, and I won’t take a thing from you. We’ll part as friends.”

“Or?” the captain asked. His hand was twitching toward the pistol in the bag at his belt.

“Or I kill you and offer the same deal to your first mate. Maybe he’ll not be so fast to leap to defend you, knowing that by doing nothing, he gets rich himself.”

“Barrick was a good man,” the captain said, looking at the dead man. The other, handless, had already passed out from blood loss. He could still be saved.

“So you know,” Zymun said, ignoring that, “I’ll be the most important man in the Seven Satrapies soon, and I could use a man of your talents in the future.”

The captain looked from Zymun to his mate, who was stony-faced. The captain dipped his fingers into a pouch and pulled out some tobacco. He tucked it under his lip. He stared at the man, still bleeding on the deck. “Rawl, bind him up.”

The mate, apparently named Rawl, did as he was bid. The captain still said nothing to Zymun.

Zymun let it sit, the captain’s death still spinning slowly in his hand.

The captain spit brown juice onto the deck. It landed in blood. He scowled. “Deal,” he said finally. “I got a few grudges you might help me with. If you can help me take one pirate in particular, I’ll let you go after one battle, on my honor as son of a slattern and a sailor.” He extended his hand, a bit gingerly. That flash of fear comforted Zymun to no end. A man who feared him this much, having barely seen what Zymun could do, wouldn’t attempt treachery soon. Perfect.

“Who’s this pirate?” Zymun asked.

“Fancies himself a bit of a cannoneer. Calls himself Cap’n Gunner.”

Chapter 8

When the
Wanderer
came in to the pier, Teia was already waiting at her spot on the railing. In addition to the normal crush of sailors and longshoremen and merchants and fishermen and scattered noblemen, the piers of Big Jasper were crammed full of small folk desperate to find out if their loved ones had made it home.

At the same time, there was a crush of Ruthgari soldiers, loading ships to go join the fight that Teia and her friends were just returning from.

The ship’s passengers crowded around midships where the plank would be lowered. Teia hopped up on the railing, one hand holding a rigging line to keep her balance. She stepped outside the railing, grabbed the hemp webbing in both hands, and rolled down. It was a brief flash of joy that she even remembered how. Her early lessons had included acrobatics daily, but since she’d started practicing with the Blackguard, there had been none.

Clinging to the webbing, Teia could already see their pier was lined with people desperate to hear more news. Andross Guile’s flagship was the first of the mangled fleet to make it home. Word of the defeat had already reached the Jaspers by homing pigeon, but the people were hungry for details. The ship came to rest against the pier with a bump. A sailor balanced next to Teia on the webbing grinned at her and hopped off first, running to secure the lines on massive cleats. Teia hopped off a moment later, not able to jump quite so far with her short stature, and plunged into the surging crowd of gossips, friends, and families, and food vendors and wine sellers eager to find those eager to cleanse their palates of hardtack and stale water.

Being swallowed by an uncaring crowd was an odd relief. Teia was short enough that she disappeared. Her acrobatics and fighting teacher back in Abornea had been only a little taller than Teia, and she’d encouraged her to explore crowds, to get to know their moods, from the angry crowd streaming out of a hippodrome after a horse race where their favorite had lost, to the eager crowd meeting the arriving dancers and menageries of exotic animals for the Odess Sun Day Festivals.

There was an awareness you could cultivate only in the claws of such a beast. A thousand or ten thousand bodies might move, but you could only be aware of perhaps a dozen immediately around you, especially if you were small. And you had to be most aware of your own movement. There’s a mesh point, a fuzzy line where your movement can be assertive, even rude, without being taken as aggressive. There was a timing: a momentary sharp annoyance could be ignored if you were gone by the time the person you’d jostled hard turned to find you. Teia ducked and pushed and surged and slithered through the bodies, her form fluid, her mind submersed fully in her body.

Her trainer, Magister Lillyfield, with a body like a young woman’s and her face craggy as the Red Cliffs, had even wanted to take Teia and her master’s daughter to experience a crowd in riot in the Darks, the wretchedly poor Angari ghetto that had persisted for centuries in Odess, but Teia’s master would never let her.

The familiar beauty of the Chromeria’s seven towers gleaming in the sun brought no joy to Teia today. Teia had nowhere to be. Commander Ironfist had said only to his Blackguards, “Take the day. Tomorrow, dawn at the field, as usual.”

A restless energy filled Teia. She needed to wander. It was good practice. The better she knew the city, the easier her Blackguard training would be. But today there was something she needed to do. She felt herself clutching at that damned vial again, using up a precious hand that could help her maneuver through the crowd.

Too much thinking, T.

She was just making it out of the docks area when a man bumped into her. She’d moved enough to merely brush past him. It could only be deliberate.

But he was gone, and there was something in her hand.

Teia turned and, stationary, lost her momentum, lost her rhythm. The crowd spit her out into the bazaar adjacent to the docks. She hadn’t even see the man. Had seen a dark cloak, maybe a grayish tunic … Damn, it was gone. Like she was an amateur. She moved out of the stream of people and looked at what was in her hand. A note.

She knew immediately she wasn’t going to like what was written there.

“Teia, look in paryl. Now.”

Teia’s formal lessons in her special color had been brief, but Magister Marta Martaens had pounded into her that seeing a woman’s pupils grow until the whites of her eyes disappeared was not merely disconcerting for others, it was terrifying. That manipulation of the eyes was what had to be done to see paryl, which sat on the spectrum as far below sub-red as sub-red was below visible red. In the past, she’d dilated then constricted her pupils quickly, but it was tiring. Now Teia put on the darkened spectacles Commander Ironfist had given her and relaxed her eyes, farther, farther.

The first place she saw paryl was written across the chest of a broad-shouldered Chromeria guard. The words, shimmery, floating, lighter than air and delicate, glowed: “Bribed.”

Her chest tightened. What? Why? She was suddenly passive, standing like a mark, agape, like a new arrival to the Jaspers, gawking rather than moving, working, planning.