The Blinding Knife (29 page)

“It’s time for you two to learn something,” Ironfist said.

“What’s that, sir?” Adrasteia asked.

“There are three scrubs I absolutely can’t let fail.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Kip, because his father asked me not to.”

Teia looked over at him, obviously not happy with the injustice of that. Kip blushed, then scowled.

Ironfist continued: “Cruxer, because he’s got the potential to be the best Blackguard in a generation.”

“How would he fail out? He’s the best of us by far,” Teia said.

“Only through bad luck. But it could happen. Could, but I won’t let it. And the third is you, Teia.”

“Me?” she asked. She sounded genuinely shocked.

“Your color,” Commander Ironfist said. “You can see through cloth, which means you can see concealed weapons. In a normal year, I could take you even if you had no legs. Your peers would be angry, but in the fullness of time they’d realize you’re worth any five of them, even if you couldn’t fight at all. I can’t do that, not this year. If I pass you on and you’re terrible, it’ll be another blow to the Blackguards’ confidence. It’s important that we know we’re elite. If I’m seen adding obvious mediocrities to our ranks, it hurts everyone. Thus, a bastard and an outer-spectrum girl have to look as good as everyone else. Teia, you’ve been hiding how good you are, but without drafting, you’ll have to get lucky to make it at your current skill level, and Kip’s a year behind the top students. So you both get extra practice, and less sleep.”

He finished wrapping Kip’s hands, scowling and being careful with the left, then helped Kip pull gloves on.

Under Ironfist’s watchful eye, Kip started punching one of the sawdust bags. They’d trained punching forms in their lines during practice, but full contact was different.

“Not so hard, not yet,” Ironfist said.

Kip got back to hitting the bag, quick but not hard. It hurt his left hand. But mostly keeping his left in a fist wasn’t hard. It was straightening it that sent tears down his face. Ironfist set Teia to doing push-ups, with claps in between. Teia was tiny, so she didn’t have that much body to throw into the air, but even then she quickly tired. Ironfist had her continue doing it from her knees.

After they got going, Ironfist wrapped his own hands and stepped up to the bag next to Kip’s and started working out himself.

Kip’s hands hurt, but after ten minutes or so, they simply felt warm. He wondered if they were bleeding under the wrappings. Ironfist simply let him know that he could start hitting harder. He thought about Liv. He thought about his mother. He thought about the Prism.

And somehow, though his thoughts took him nowhere and he discovered nothing new, he felt better after beating the hell out of an inanimate object. But Ironfist kept going, and going. Kip followed. After an hour, Kip was the walking dead. Ironfist threw him a towel and said, “Kip, go to the lift. We’ll be along in a minute.”

Kip left. The temptation to eavesdrop was strong, but the idea of facing Ironfist’s wrath was daunting. Plus, it just seemed disrespectful. He walked toward the lift, wiping sweat away with the towel.

He was hungry. It seemed like he was always hungry here. The glims, or second-year, and above students had lounges that were reputed to serve food for longer hours—or for the gleams and beams, the third- and fourth-year students, all day and night. But first-year students weren’t allowed. You had to earn everything here, from library access to food.

Kip coughed, and in his sub-red vision the spray shot out in a cloud of little white and red dots.

He raised his hand, and he was in Garriston, covered in green luxin, the smell of gunpowder and blood and luxin and sweat and fear heavy in his nostrils. He held up his hand and shot out bullets at the soldiers massed around him. A man’s cheek was blown off, head jerking around and then twisting back toward Kip, flinging teeth and blood droplets, the man staggering into him.

Kip put his hand on the man’s forehead, as if blessing him. And shot a bullet into his brain, gore blasting back into his open palm.

He was pure will, and those who opposed him were nothing but chaff on a breeze blown about a titan’s knees.

And then he was back, blinking, shivering.

It was like all this was so
thin
, so fragile. A lie. Kip was worrying about passing some test? About what fifteen-year-old children thought about him? Death was huge, towering, indomitable, victorious everywhere. One tiny lead ball away. A sliver of luxin, and all this was exposed as frippery and folly.

He barely had time to dab away the tears from his eyes—he wasn’t crying, why were there tears?—before Ironfist and Teia came down the hall.

Ironfist glanced at Kip but said nothing. They got on the lift. Kip wanted to ask him something, but he couldn’t even put it into words. How did Ironfist do it? How did he kill people, and come back, still himself? How did he straddle the worlds? Ironfist was a rock, unperturbed, solid, an island in a sea of madness.

Commander Ironfist ran his hand over his shaven, bare head. His voice came out low, gravelly. “While my mother bled out her life from that assassin’s blade, I held her, Kip. I prayed. Prayed as I never had before, or since. Orholam didn’t hear me. I believed I wasn’t worthy of his gaze, that he sees only the good and great.” His face twisted for a half second in some emotion, quickly suppressed. Grief? Desolation? But his voice was level. “Kip, the world doesn’t explain itself. You go on.”

“How?” Kip’s voice sounded small and hollow in his own ears.

“You just do.”

Kip looked at the commander. That was it? The answer was no answer? He felt his heart drop.

Teia looked from one to the other, mystified, but said nothing, asked nothing. Kip wished he could thank her for that.

The lift came to a stop at their floor.

Ironfist handed Teia the key. His voice was gruff, but not yet back to its old timbre. “Every night. I won’t always be able to make it, but I’ll be there as often as I can. Kip, I’ve heard you’ve been barred from practicum, and Teia, you need to work on your abilities, too, even though I can’t help you much with your type of drafting. Tomorrow you both start practicing magic.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kip and Adrasteia went their separate ways, not sure what to say to each other. Kip washed up and went to bed. His body ached; his mind was numb, crying out for sleep, but every time he closed his eyes he saw blood, brains, the bullet blessing.

Dawn was a relief of the only kind he now knew: a move from one kind of fight to another. He got up to fill another day. If he was busy enough, he wouldn’t have time to think.

“She’s a beautiful woman,” Karris said.

Gavin said nothing. They were hiking back through the jungle to their own camp. This was the first thing Karris had said since exclaiming
over the blue snow—which Gavin had claimed to know nothing about.

“She likes you,” Karris said.

Gavin said nothing.

“You can spend the night with her, you know,” Karris said.

Now she was starting to infuriate him.

“You’ve been edgy,” Karris said. “Maybe it’ll help calm you down if you go get it out of your system.”

Gavin stopped. “You’re saying this to me. Really. You?”

Karris gave a tiny shrug. “What I asked earlier… it wasn’t fair. I’ve got no claim on you. You and I don’t have anything that should keep you from… cavorting as you please. You’re the Prism, there ought to be some benefits, right?”

“Please don’t say stupid things to me, Karris.” Cavorting?

“I was just—”

“I’ve made my decision.” And it’s you.

“And I’m telling you—”

“Shut
the fuck
up.”

Usually, that would have made her explode. This time, she said nothing. They walked in silence. Made camp in silence. Slept in silence.

Somehow, he did sleep, but he dreamed of colored hells and his brothers. The dread inside him kept that sleep from leaving him rested. By the time Karris woke him for his watch, hours before dawn, the snow was gone. While Karris slept, Gavin sat up. For some reason, he was haunted by his dead little brother Sevastian. Little Sevastian, the good-hearted brother. The peacemaker between his constantly feuding older siblings.

Who would Sevastian have sided with in the Prisms’ War?

In this insane world where Gavin was supposed to have some sort of holy link directly to a deity who didn’t exist or didn’t care, instead, he cared only about what his dead little brother would have thought of him. Who would you have been, Sevastian? Could I have killed Gavin and then handed over the reins to you and the world now know peace? What sort of world would this be, if that damned wight hadn’t murdered you?

A blue wight, too. What did that mean? The very color Gavin had lost control of now was the color that had murdered Sevastian. It was the very color that Dazen had broken out of. Coincidence?

Yes, Gavin, that’s what a coincidence
is
.

The sun rose, but there was only darkness in Gavin’s heart.

Dazen Guile stared at the dead man in the wall of the green prison. He and the dead man were picking scabs from their knees. They’d been in the green hell for days, a week? Surely not two weeks yet. They’d been quietly falling unconscious for unknown periods, quietly licking water off the wall, quietly starving. Maybe two weeks, from the scabs.

At some point before falling unconscious, he’d drafted tiny slivers of green. Whatever else it was, luxin was clean. Dazen had pushed luxin out—not out of his palms or under his fingernails, but out of his cuts. First he’d done the cuts on his hands and knees, then finally the inflamed, infected cut on his chest. The pain had been horrific. Yellow pus had preceded the luxin. When he woke, he’d licked the wall for moisture for an hour, then did it again, and passed out again. After a third time, only plasma and blood leaked from the wound.

Eventually, the fever had passed, leaving him passionless, empty, but finally aware again. Somewhat himself. A weaker self.

Like the blue prison, this green one was shaped like a squashed ball, a narrow chute above, a trickle of water down one wall, and a narrow drain below for the water and his waste.

His jailer—his brother—apparently hadn’t yet figured out that Dazen had broken out of the blue prison. There must surely be some advantage to that fact, but Dazen couldn’t figure out what it was. All he knew was that since he’d come to this prison, there had been no bread. He hated that thick, lumpy, coarse, dense bread—but now he would have begged, would have licked broken glass for it.

Perhaps his brother did know. Perhaps this was punishment.

Nonetheless, Gavin hadn’t had the guts to starve him to death before, and he’d had sixteen years to do that, so Dazen didn’t think Gavin would starve him now. At least not on purpose.

He felt weak, and that weakness was temptation. He hadn’t drafted green since the fever passed, and green was strength, wildness.

Green had doubtless saved him, but it was death now. Because it was strength, and strength would be addictive here. Every time he drafted a tiny sip, he would want to draft more. And green was irrationality, wildness. Wildness in a cage meant insanity, suicide.

I’m close enough to that as is.

He started building the towers of suppositions again. That was the beauty of years spent drafting blue. It ordered your thoughts, smothered passion.

Blue still hated the illogic of how he thought of his brother as Gavin and himself as Dazen, but he’d held firm to that decision. Gavin was a loser. Gavin had lost the war, Gavin had let himself be imprisoned. Dazen had stolen Gavin’s identity, so let him have it. “Gavin” was the dead man in the wall now, he the prisoner, he was Dazen now. He was a new man, and as Dazen, he would escape and he would win back all that should be his.

It was a touch of black madness, he knew. But perhaps a bit of madness is the only way to stay sane alone in a dungeon for sixteen years.

Recenter, Dazen. Dazed. Dozed. Dozen. Doozie. Double. Doubt. Certainty. T’s. Bifurcations. Intersections. Directions. Direct. Deceased. Dead. Dozing. Dazed. Dazen.

He expelled a long, slow breath. Glared at the dead man, who glared back, defiant.

“I’d tell you to go to hell, but—” he told the dead man.

“I’ve heard that one before,” the dead man replied. “Remember?”

Dazen grumbled into his beard. He held out his right hand. Either Gavin knows I’m in the next prison, or he doesn’t.

No, back up.

Either Gavin had put into place a system that would tell him when I moved from one prison to another, or he hadn’t.

If he’d gone to the trouble of making more than one prison, he’d have put a system into place to know when I went from one to the other.

Either his alarm worked, or it didn’t work.

I’m betting it worked. Nothing Gavin has done has failed so far.

So if the alarm worked, it showed that I’ve come here.

If it showed I’ve come here, either Gavin hasn’t seen the notice or he has.