The Blinding Knife (17 page)

He wasn’t sure what she was looking for, though, and pretty certain that he wasn’t supposed to know.

“You don’t gamble, do you, Commander?” she asked.

“No, my lady.” How did she know that? He supposed it wasn’t the kind of thing that would be hard to find out, but that she had, that she cared about it, and that she recalled it was what made the White both alien and a little frightening.

“Always thought that was strange. You seem like the kind who would.”

“I used to,” Ironfist admitted. “I had a bad experience.” He kept his face even. Equanimity was all a man could aspire to. Knowing what you had control over, and what you didn’t. The Nuqaba had no place in his thoughts.

“My husband used to play Nine Kings. He maintained that he was a mediocre player, though he rarely walked away from a table with much less than he brought to it. He had a reputation as an amiable player who served fine liquor and excellent tobacco, though, so he played with all sorts of men from all over the Seven Satrapies. We were married three years—and I was only beginning to really fall in love with him—before he got me to come to one of his parties. It wasn’t the night he would have chosen for me to see.

“A young lord came. Varigari family. From a line of fishermen before they were raised in the Blood Wars. He came in, new and cocksure, and over the course of the night he went through a small fortune. The lords my husband played with that night were wealthy, and decent men, not wolves. They could see what was happening. They
told the young Varigari to quit. He refused. He won often enough that he kept hope, and I could see the resignation on their faces: he loses a small fortune, and perhaps it teaches him a lesson, so be it. Dawn came, and he had nothing, and there was this moment where he bet a small castle in order to stay in. I saw this look on his face. It’s etched into my memory. Do you know what he was feeling?”

Ironfist could feel it right now, the memory was so hot and sharp. “Terror, but elation, too. There’s something potent in knowing that you have pushed your life to one of its pivots. It is insanity.”

“I glanced at my husband, unable to believe what I was seeing. Everyone else was looking at the young Varigari. My husband was looking at everyone else. And I realized a few things all at once.” She coughed into her handkerchief, then glanced at it. “Keep worrying I’m going to cough blood one of these times. Not yet, thank Orholam.”

She smiled to defuse his worries, and continued, “First, about the young man: the small fortune he’d lost was not a small fortune to him, and the small castle he’d bet was probably the last thing his family owned. To him this wasn’t a lesson; this was
ruin
. Second, my husband was no mediocre player. He had the winning hand, and he had the wealth to risk playing it. He was an expert, but an expert who took pains to rarely win, because he’d found something that was more valuable to him than winning small fortunes and becoming known as a great player of Nine Kings. What he was really doing every time he played was taking the measure of those he played with. Finding not just their tells, but how they reacted to the whims of fate and fortune. Was this satrap greedy? Did this Color get so focused on one opponent that she ignored a true threat? Was this one smarter than anyone knew?”

Scary to think of the White paired up with a man as smart as she was.

She said no more.

“And?” Ironfist asked.

“And?” she asked.

“There was a lesson in there somewhere,” Ironfist said.

“Was there?” she said, but her eyes danced. “I’m so old.”

“I know you too well to think your mind is just wandering.”

She smiled. “When the big bets are on the table, Commander, it’s good to know which character in that little drama you are.”

Problem with being surrounded by brilliant people: they expect
your mind to be as nimble as theirs. Ironfist had no idea what she was talking about. He’d get there eventually, he always did, but he’d have to mull it over for a while. “If I may, my lady?”

“Please.”

“Did Lord Rathcore ever play against Luxlord Andross Guile?”

She chuckled. “I guess it depends what you mean. Nine Kings? Never. He knew better. You don’t play against those to whom you can only lose. I’ve seen Andross play. He uses his stacks of gold like a bludgeon. There is no gracefully losing a little bit of gold to Andross. It’s win big or lose bigger against him. For my husband to play Andross was to lose a fortune or to lose the whole purpose of his games by exposing how skilled he was.”

“And if I wasn’t asking about Nine Kings?” Ironfist asked. He had been, but she obviously meant to tell him more.

She smiled, and he was glad that he served her. To be the commander of the Blackguard was to stand ready to give your life for those you protected, regardless of your feelings. But for this woman, even frail and with few days left, Ironfist would gladly trade his life. She said, “All I’ll say is this: Andross Guile isn’t the White, and it galls him deeply.”

But the White was chosen by lot. Orholam himself moved his will through that.

But if Andross Guile had thought being the White was a victory within his grasp, maybe that was because it actually had been. Surely to corrupt the election of a White was the work of a heretic—worse, an atheist. Ironfist couldn’t comprehend it.

The further implication—that Lord Rathcore had stymied Andross Guile by instead getting his wife Orea selected—was almost worse. If the White’s election had been tainted by the machinations of men, was it thereby void? How could Orholam tolerate such a thing?

And yet the White was a holy woman, a good woman. Perhaps she hadn’t been involved, or hadn’t known, or hadn’t figured it out until many years later. And then what would you do? Abdicate because there was some blight on your election that no one else had ever noticed and that even you hadn’t known about? Perhaps that would bring greater disrepute on the Chromeria than simply to let it lie.

But it shook Ironfist’s faith. What had Gavin said on the ship? Some jest about being chosen by Orholam—a jest that only made sense as a jest if you didn’t believe Orholam really did choose.

Lord Rathcore had blocked Luxlord Guile from becoming the White, but couldn’t block him from having his son made the Prism.

It almost took Ironfist’s breath away to think of it in such nakedly political terms. He was no naïf. He served these people. He knew that even the greatest had their foibles. He knew they all had vast ambition. But surely,
surely
some few things must be held holy.

He remembered again holding his mother’s bleeding body, screaming his prayers to Orholam, praying until he thought heart and soul would burst. Praying that Orholam would see him, just for one moment of his life. Hear him, just once. And his mother died.

“Who won? That night. What happened?” he asked.

She was quiet for a moment. “My husband let the young man win. No matter.” The White waved a frail hand, as if to shoo the example away. “Commander,” she said quietly, “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry. Let this be my absolution: as important as it is for you to know what character you are in this little drama, perhaps right now it is more important for you to know which character
I
am. I am the gambler, Commander, just waiting for Orholam’s eye to rise over the horizon and reveal the truth. I am the gambler, and I’ve bet the family castle, and I’m waiting for the cards to turn.”

“There’s war coming, isn’t there?” Ironfist asked.

She sighed. “Yes, blind though the Spectrum is to it. But I wasn’t talking about the war.”

He walked to the door, stopped. “What happened to that young man?”

“He gambled again later with someone else and lost everything, as gamblers do.”

“Skill, Will, Source, and Movement. These are the necessaries for the creation of luxin,” Magister Kadah was saying. She had a gift. A great gift. She could make even magic seem boring.

Kip sat in the back of the lecture hall today, stomach growling, but
absolutely determined not to open his big yapper. Adrasteia sat in the seat next to his, paying attention, and Ben-hadad was next to her, one yellow lens of his glasses continually swinging down in front of his eye, no matter how he tried to keep it up.

Together, they took up one of the little wooden tables. Sitting together, almost like friends.

It wasn’t real, not yet. They didn’t know Kip. They let him sit with them. It was different. But it was closer than Kip had felt to friendship in a long time.

He looked over at Teia. She saw him looking and glanced over at him, a question in her eyes.

And at exactly that moment, Magister Kadah looked up and caught them. Rotten luck. “Kip, do you have something to share with the class?” she asked.

Don’t do it, Kip. No smart remarks.

Problem was, he had no idea what the magister had been talking about, and his mind had drifted. “I was thinking about the instability of imperfectly crafted luxin,” Kip said. Magister Kadah had been talking about Skill, Kip thought, so it seemed like it might be close to a real question.

“Hmm,” Magister Kadah said, as if disappointed she hadn’t caught Kip napping. “Very well.” She ran long fingers along the edge of her stick, flipped it over. On the back side, there was a color spectrum. She considered it for a moment, rejected it, walked over to the wall.

She opened a panel on the wall. It was dazzlingly bright. The lightwell, Kip realized. There was a slide with a mirror mounted on it, and she pushed that into the light stream. A pure beam of white radiance shot across the room onto a bare white wall behind the students.

“This is light as it is. It is the keystone, the base on which all else is born. And this is how we imagine light is—” She held up a screen over the light stream. Brilliant colors were cast upon the wall, cerulean blue immediately next to jade green abutting on vibrant yellow next to an orange to make fruit jealous next to a clear red.

“These are the colors we draft—minus sub-red and superviolet, of course, which most of you can’t see. We’ll talk about them later. This is how the colors are in a rainbow, right, discipulae?”

There were some mutters. The colors were in the right order.

“Right, discipulae?” she repeated, irritated.

“Yes, Magister,” most of the class answered.

“Morons,” she said.

“
This
is light in our world—” She held a prism in front of the stream, and it sheared the light into the whole visible spectrum. Unlike the screen, which had the most vibrant colors immediately next to each other, the colors of the natural spectrum were broken into a continuum—but the continuum wasn’t even. Some colors took up more space than others.

“In some ways, drafting is like anything else. If you sit in a poorly crafted chair, it breaks and you fall. It fails its purpose. Poorly crafted luxin is the same. On the color line, there are resonance points. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. This is as Orholam has willed. At these resonance points”—she pointed to the places on the color line that corresponded to the bright colors she had put on the screen earlier—“at these places, luxin takes on a stable form. Becomes itself. Becomes useful.” She pointed to places on the color line, in order. “Why, smarter auditors might ask, why those colors?” Magister Kadah smiled unpleasantly. She did that a lot.

Likes making people feel stupid, doesn’t she?

Kip had noticed that the distances between the colors weren’t even. Some colors were wide bands—blue stretched over a huge area, and red, too, but yellow and orange were tiny.

“Why does blue cover so much area? We might point to this”—she pointed deeper in blue—“in our humanness, and call it violet. Why can’t we draft violet? Anyone?”

No one said anything. Not even Kip.

“It’s simple, and it’s a mystery. Because luxin doesn’t resonate there. You can’t make a stable luxin from violet. It doesn’t work. Seven is the holy number. Seven points, seven colors, seven satrapies. Instead of demanding that the mystery surrender itself to the hammer blows of our intellects, we align ourselves with the mystery, and when we find perfect alignment with the piece of his creation that Orholam has given us, we draft perfectly. This is what we strive for. When you’re not exactly in the center of his will, your blue will fall to dust, your red will fade, your yellow will shimmer away to nothingness. Those points, that perfection, that alignment with Orholam himself is what we seek, every time we draft. And when we do it perfectly, we become conduits of his will. This is what makes us better than the dullards out there, the munds, the norms, the non-drafters who only absorb light rather than reflect it. This is why bichromes—those who can draft two
colors—are honored more highly than those who can draft only one. Bichromes are closer to Orholam, they partake of more of his holy creation. Each color has lessons to teach us, lessons about what it is to be human, and lessons on what it is to be like Orholam.

“And this, of course, is what makes the Prism so special. He is the only man on earth to commune perfectly with Orholam. He alone sees the world as it is. He alone is pure.” She stared directly at Kip, walked toward him. “And this is why we oppose any who would taint the Holy Prism’s light, or any who would dim his glory and bring shame upon him.”

It took Kip’s breath away. She hated him because she revered his father and Kip brought shame upon him?