The Blinding Knife (35 page)

“Do you think being Prism is too small for you, boy?”

“You keep saying these things that make no sense to me,” Kip said.

“Because I keep trying to draw you as the next Prism, and I can’t. You won’t be the Prism, Kip.”

“I don’t aspire to that,” Kip said. A chill. Like being collared by history.

“Do you aspire to more?”

“There
is
no more, is there?” Kip asked. What could be bigger than being the Prism?

“Is there a name that the others call you?”

“You mean besides Kip? Sure: Fatty. Lard Guile. Bastard. Pokey.”

“Something else. Maybe I’ve gone about this wrong. Maybe instead of trying to make your card, maybe I should try to decide which card is yours.”

“Look, I just came here to learn how to play better. Can you help me or not?”

“What do you know about Zee Oakenshield?”

“Nothing,” Kip said. He’d never even heard the name.

“Do you know anything about the cards?”

“I know all sorts of things about the cards. I’ve memorized seven hundred and thirty-six of them by name and ability. I’ve committed a
dozen famous games to memory. I know twenty of the standard decks and why they work. Does that count for anything?”

“No.”

“Oh hell.” If Kip had honestly wasted all the time he’d spent studying, he was going to find the nearest tall building and throw himself off.

“I jest,” she said. “It means you’re ready to start.”

“I feel a sudden, intense desire to throw a temper tantrum,” Kip said.

She squinted at him. “The cards are true, young Guile. And that’s why this game has been played by generations of fools and madmen and wise women and satraps. Take a moment and soak that up. The strengths and weaknesses on the cards are honest to the figures they depict. Not all-encompassing, of course—for a few numbers, a few lines, and a pretty picture can only tell so much—but not misleading. But that’s only the beginning of the greater truth, the greater gift that is Mirroring.” She walked over to the wall and grabbed a card. She sat on a stool and spun around twice like a little girl. “Come, look, and see. Taste of the light of Orholam.”

Superstitious drivel, or magical invocation, or efficacious prayer? Kip had no idea. The old woman seemed half mad. Maybe every word she was telling him was a lie or a delusion.

The card was, Kip guessed, an original—a young woman, dressed in leathers, buttons of turquoise, pale skin, flaming red hair piled atop her head, caged between black ironwood thorns. Green stained the skin of her left arm, which was down at her side, leaves coiling about it. Her right hand was behind her back, as if she might be concealing a dagger. She stood straight-backed, and the smirk on her face was imperious, ready for anything.

“This is your great-great-great-great-grandmother, Zee Oakenshield. In most ways, she is the founder of your house, though the Guile name comes from elsewhere.”

She was attractive, and there was nothing about her to remind Kip of himself—but that smirk was all Gavin Guile. It was like the artist had carried her expression over a century and dropped it on the man.

Instead of commenting on the startling similarity, and the obvious gift the artist must have had to have captured it so well, Kip said, “She doesn’t even have a shield.” Inane. Nicely done, Kip.

“She never carried a shield, oaken or otherwise. The name was for something else. But I needn’t tell you. You see the gems?”

Kip nodded. There were five tiny gems, framing the picture, one at each corner, one above her head.

“Draft a bit, any color, and then touch all those gems at the same time.” She pointed at a painting with broad bands of the drafting colors on one wall.

Kip stared at the blue. Blue was far less frightening than green. Within seconds, he felt the wash of cool rationality. Should he obey this woman? Well, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t learn anything. The only reason he’d come was to learn. Besides, what was she going to do with a card that she couldn’t do to him with one of her many guns?

With the blue in his fingertips, he touched the gems.

Nothing happened.

Well, that was a little disappointing.

“Push harder,” Janus Borig barked. “It needn’t bleed, but it must be near enough to call to your blood. You’ve got soft hands. It shouldn’t be hard.”

Soft hands? Kip grimaced, but obeyed, tapping the blue jewel hard, his other fingers loosely over their corresponding jewels.

Zee blinks to clear her eyes, peering into the dawn. Filtering through the smoke of two burning cities on either side of the Great River, the rising light is red. It’s disorienting, having his view cast this way and that, without his body moving, without any control.

There are enemy soldiers on both sides of the Great River. Kip can almost hear the whisper of thoughts attached to those men—who they are, what they do—but “enemy” is the only thing that drifts through to him.

She’s on the high ground, and her siege-drafters are already at work, ropes and cranks at the ready, waiting for the dawn to get enough light to do the rest of their work.

Zee turns to a hulking brute of a man with one eye. He looks at her, a frightening visage, but deferring. An officer? A subordinate, certainly. He holds a great bow, an arrow the size of a ship’s spar drawing back. Her mouth moves, but Kip hears nothing. He can only see.

The enemy is four hundred paces away, twenty paces downhill, downwind from Zee, to judge by the flapping of the standards. The Ruthgari army is jogging, keeping ranks. Some of Zee’s horsemen—most still in their teens—are already charging. She sees officers waving at them angrily, calling them back perhaps?—and then, defeated, the officers follow them.

Her line is tearing, some of the clansmen on foot following after the horsemen, spoiling the shots for her archers.

Once the foot soldiers charge, the archers would have to leave off shooting. Instead of a dozen volleys of a thousand arrows each, it would be six.

She shouts something, looking toward the siege-drafters, who have already drafted the great green luxin crossbeam and are filling the barrels of flammable red luxin to hurl at the approaching army.

They—and a dozen other siege-drafting teams—may get off two rounds.

She jumps up on her horse, the sudden movement sickening Kip, shouting something to—Small Bear, that’s his name!

Small Bear says nothing, adjusts his aim incrementally, and looses the huge arrow. A thousand archers follow his lead.

She grabs a torch and rides out in front of her men. Kip thinks she’s shouting. Perhaps all the men are shouting. She throws the torch in a high arc, and her men surge forward.

Her thirty mighty men surround her in seconds.

Something is shifting, sinking deeper—

A flaming barrel of red luxin smashes into the front lines of the Ruthgari, bursting and cutting a vertical flaming slash, crushing men and setting them alight. I draft green off the grasses that will soon run red. To my left, Young Bull and Griv Gazzin are drafting blue and green respectively, swatting arrows and firebombs out of the air, keeping me safe.

I draft a lance of green luxin and kick my stallion’s flanks.

“Enough.”

The sound reverberates oddly.

I don’t seem to notice. The taste of ashes heavy in the air is more noticeable by its sudden absence than it had been in its presence. When did she start tasting? Smelling? Then the smell of ash and sweat and horses—gone. The feel of the saddle between her knees, knuckles tight on the lance.

It goes dark.

Kip blinked, and found his hand held in the crone’s. She’d pulled his fingers off the gems of the card one at a time.

Breathless, Kip looked into her eyes. He could feel the blue luxin leaving him, draining into nothingness, abandoning him, leaving him empty, lifeless.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “You
heard
something there, at the end? Smelled? Tasted?”

“A, a little.”

Her eyes lit. “They lied! Of course they lied. Of course. They’re Guiles. But why would he send you here alone? He must have known you’d be discovered for what you are. We must know. Stare at the ceiling.”

The ceiling, which Kip would have noticed earlier if it hadn’t been for the profusion of original cards, was a full spectrum, enameled and shining. “Do you want me to do something? Draft or—”

She took his hand. “Keep looking up is all.” She pressed his fingers onto a card, one at a time. She pushed his pinky down, hard. A whiff of tea leaves and tobacco washed over him. He was about to comment when he felt a bone-deep weariness settle over him. His body ached. Then, as if his ears had been unstoppered, he could hear the creaking of wood and the whooshing of wind, the slap of waves.

He pondered the exact words. It was a cool evening, and the scent of gunpowder clung to the ship and the men. Somewhere on the ship, a woman was weeping, over the dead, no doubt. His room was dark, lit by only a single candle. Outside, silver streaks of moonlight cut the night like a sword. He rolled the quill between his fingers.

His naked hand lay across the parchment, holding it in place. No secretary for this. This was treason. There was a name the missive was addressed to, but the hand obscured it—it ended “-os,” which meant it could be anyone Ruthgari, or one of thousands whose name was Ruthgari even if their blood no longer was.

Then Kip lost all awareness of himself.

“A more advantageous peace may be found on the opposite shore of war. Dagnu is—” I write, the scritching of my quill filling the little cabin until the last word, which is silent. Muted. Odd.

Then the cabin… dark. I feel—Kip feels—Kip felt dizzy. He was back, staring through his own eyes once more.

Janus Borig puffed on her pipe, looking angry. “At age fifteen? No.”

“What the—What the hell just happened?” Kip demanded, yanking his hand back.

“You didn’t tell me, or I could have made things easier for you.”

“Tell you what? This is my fault somehow?” Kip was scared, angry. Was he crazy? What had she done to him?

“You’re telling me you don’t know? The cards make their connection
through light, Kip. The more colors you can draft, the truer your experience.”

“What happened to me?” Kip demanded.

“You saw more than you were supposed to. Let me leave it at that.”

“Was it real?”

“That is a more difficult question than you know.”

“Did she die?” Kip asked.

“Zee? Not in that battle, though she lost.”

“She was fighting against…” Kip hadn’t quite gotten it.

“Darien Guile. Fifteen years later she bought peace by having her daughter marry him. It was said that she wanted to marry him herself, but she was too old to bear children and she knew lasting peace could only be bought by binding the families together forever. There were rumors of an affair between Zee and Darien, but they weren’t true. Darien Guile respected Zee enormously and might have preferred to marry her, but they both knew how much blood might be spilled over one man’s broken oath and one woman’s folly. A lesson your family had to learn the hard way some time later.”

Kip didn’t know what she was talking about, but he assumed from how she said it that the war Zee and Darien had been fighting must have been started by something personal. “Was he a good man?” Kip asked.

“Darien? He was a Guile.”

“What was the second card?” Something about Dagnu. That was the old pagan god. Kip wondered how old that card had been.

“A mistake. I grabbed the closest real card, and I should have known better.”

Which was no answer at all. “These cards all do that?” Kip asked, looking at the wall with awe and fear.

“Only the originals.”

“Which ones are originals?” Kip asked.

“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that many of the cards here are booby-trapped. If you try to take them off the wall, you’ll have some very nasty surprises in store. If you get them off the wall and try to draft their truth, you most likely won’t survive the hell they put your mind through.”

“I thought you wanted to help me,” Kip said.

“I do. I’m just letting you know that if you steal from me, you’ll be left a gibbering idiot. Even the real cards, used correctly, have
dangers. Not all truths are beautiful. These cards can make a man delusional. Make him lose himself. They can teach… hideous things to those who wed not wisdom to power.” There was a bitterness in her tone, but before Kip could ask, she went on: “Regardless, a woman must needs protect herself. I don’t care about your father, except to make his card. I don’t care about you, except to make your card. This is what a Mirror does. It’s who I am. It is my mission from Orholam himself, and I will do it well. If you help me do it, I will be happy to help you. You’ve let me know what you can draft. That helps enormously, so I’ll give you this to start: if you play with the deck that Andross Guile gives you, you’ll always lose.”

“Paryl is unique among the colors,” Teia’s tutor said. “And it is uniquely dangerous.”