The Broken Eye (100 page)

This is what you get for trusting a slave.

It had been a colossal blunder. The kind Karris never would have missed if she hadn’t been so pressed for time. How long had Marissia sat on that information, in order to make sure Karris
was
pressed for time? Marissia could have known about Gavin’s imprisonment for weeks, and held it back just so Karris would rush off and get herself killed. Even the trial by combat had been Marissia’s idea.

But the White trusts her. And she loves Gavin. She wouldn’t hold back information when he was in danger, would she?

But Gavin had pushed her aside without a thought when he’d married Karris. How would Karris react if a man had done that to her?

Orholam have mercy.

The crowd quieted, and Karris waited for the word. She would be dragged off as a co-conspirator. Alone, with no one to speak for her, all that needed to happen was for the Nuqaba to say that Karris was a madwoman, and that a trial by combat was never part of Parian history. There would be those in this vast crowd who knew that was true.

It was all falling apart.

“It has been many, many years since the trial by combat has been requested,” the Nuqaba said. And Karris’s heart soared. She had a chance. “As set down in our ancient laws, the trial by combat can only be requested once, and must be fulfilled by the one who asked for it. No champions!”

Bait, swallowed.

Before the crowd could shout, enthralled by the idea of some insubstantial little girl in a dress fighting in a trial by combat herself, the Nuqaba continued. “There is no drafting allowed in trials by combat, and the trial is to the death!”

Now the crowd roared.

So Marissia didn’t betray me.

But this was almost worse. All Karris’s preparations to hide her drafting abilities were for nothing. Either the Nuqaba or Eirene Malargos had known who Karris was and that she could draft. The Nuqaba was vicious, but she wasn’t stupid.

Shit.

The Nuqaba quieted the crowd again, and gestured to the man who’d been sitting to her left. As he stood, the Nuqaba said, “Do you, O common woman, wish to face the hand of our justice, the Lord Commandant of the Armies of Paria, Enki Hammer?”

On his cue, the man, clearly the Nuqaba’s consort, came forward out from under their shade to stand full in the noon sun. He was tall, very tall, with slim hips and shoulders but the reedy forearms that told a warrior like Karris that under his rich Parian cloak—his
burnous
—and his gold-brocaded tunic that he was a soldier. He wore the ghotra, too, to cover his head, but there was nothing of pious humility in him. Even his ghotra was woven through with gold.

He shrugged off the white-and-black-striped burnous and pulled the laces of his tunic open, dropping it to reveal impressive musculature. Karris wanted to hate him for his vanity, but she dabbled in vanity more than her fair share.

Odd, she thought. That would have made me hate him twice as much not too long ago.

Oh, she was supposed to respond. Something gutsy but that didn’t hint to the crowd that she was a fighter. “I would rather die,” she shouted, “than let you hurt my husband any more.”

The crowd cheered. The Nuqaba tried to whisper something to Enki, but he shook his head. She tried again, but the crowd was too loud, too impatient. He waved her off. Later.

As Enki jogged down the steps and across the sand toward the spina, looking vexed, the Nuqaba waited for the cheer to die and then shouted, “Then may your blood be on your own head!”

There was confusion on the spina as the soldiers tried to figure out what precisely they were supposed to do during a trial the likes of which they’d never heard of, much less trained for, all while under the watching eyes of fifty thousand people. The professional in Karris had some pity on them, but she said nothing. Any hint she gave that she knew exactly what she was doing could get her killed. This is why you strike fast—some part of the enemy force may have intelligence that will destroy you, but if they can’t communicate it in time, it doesn’t matter.

She bent her head and wiped at her cheeks defiantly, as if she were weeping uncontrollably but was angry about it. A fool wisp of a girl in a ridiculous dress, that’s what she was, not at all a Blackguard.

She wanted to look at Gavin. She wanted to go to him. But she’d lose herself if she did.

Finally, on quick orders from Enki himself, the Tafok Amagez set up a perimeter around the spina as he mounted the steps. An Amagez broke ranks and came forward for the offering of weapons. He was probably thirty-five years old, ancient for a warrior-drafter. He lifted his scabbarded longsword from his belt and offered it to Karris. Another Amagez joined him a moment later and offered a stabbing spear. Then another, with a scorpion. Enki himself wore a long, thin-bladed scimitar, scabbard and hilt encrusted with mother-of-pearl and rubies.

Karris looked at the weapons, and shook her head and waved her hand in denial, still making the motions large enough that they could be interpreted even by the farmers in the highest seats. “Oh, no, I shan’t need anything there, I think. But thank you.”

She glanced at Gavin as murmurs rippled through the crowd again. No weapons? What insanity was this? Was she simply committing suicide?

Gavin was still twitching, still obviously in great pain, but he said nothing, didn’t cry out in his agony, didn’t call out to Karris. He couldn’t see what was happening, and the not knowing would be driving him insane, but he held his silence. She knew at once it was because he trusted her. He knew she had a plan, and he knew it was desperate, and he wasn’t going to distract her from it.

For a man who’d been in control of everything, and been the driver of change in most of the great moments in the Seven Satrapies for the last two decades, to trust her that much moved her beyond words.

No time for that, dammit! She scrubbed a tear from her eye, a real one.

Unwilling to let her dominate the crowd’s eyes, Enki had stepped forward and raised both hands to heaven. “Orholam!” he cried. “Look upon the works of our hands! May your justice be done to traitors!”

He lowered his hands, and then took off his ghotra, as if this were connected to drawing Orholam’s attention. His black hair was woven with gold wire into clumps that hung past his shoulders. In Parian tradition, that hair was his glory, and he gloried in it.

The gesture wasn’t lost on the Ruthgari, who didn’t wear the ghotra, but were well aware of their neighbors’ beliefs about it. Nor were they immune to appreciating a handsome, athletic man who was six and a half feet tall.

He was like a smaller, vain version of Ironfist. Which was a bit disturbing, when Karris thought about it. Who picked a lover who looked so much like her own brother?

Karris walked up beside Enki and stood facing the Nuqaba’s box, waiting for him.

A flicker of doubt crossed his face. Karris was acting with such conviction that she could tell the big ignoramus thought that maybe these trials really were a tradition. He stood beside her, but not too close.

Around the spina in a circle, the Tafok Amagez drew in their colors. Any drafting would mean death.

Karris curtsied carefully to the Nuqaba and a steely-eyed Eirene Malargos. Beside her, Enki bowed deeply.

The crowd fell silent.

The Nuqaba waved a hand, signaling they could begin, but Karris ignored it. She turned to Enki and curtsied, more elaborately, an old court curtsy, with sweeping arms bringing her skirts wide, and her ankles crossed. Enki bowed to her, but carefully, keeping his eyes on her.

And … nothing happened.

Ben-hadad! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!

Enki lifted his sword and readied himself, while Karris stood on one foot, her right ankle pushing against her left calf.

“One moment,” Karris said. She held a finger up. “I have an itch.” She moved her right foot up and down her calf.

Enki looked at her, incredulous. Was she mad? And then he laughed.

And it was as if Ben-hadad had made the catch to be activated by laughter instead of by crossing her ankles, as they’d discussed. Karris felt the catch give and the big ridiculous ribbon on her right hip popped out and the luxin holding together layers of skirt and petticoats let go, swinging open like a door over her thigh, giving Karris access to the quick-release scabbard that covered the length of the inside of her thigh.

At the same time the skirts popped open, the scabbard swiveled from the inner thigh where it had been hidden during her search to her outer thigh and hand.

Most scabbards required a blade to be stabbed into them, and likewise, drawn vertically out before it could be used: they took two motions. This was a tension scabbard, holding the blade in a hug instead, letting the blade come out horizontally, so that one could draw as one slashed.

It was only a fraction of a heartbeat faster than a normal draw, but a fraction was all Karris needed. She sprang forward in the moment Enki’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Onetwothree steps, the back of her left hand batting his sword aside—

And she buried the blade under his chin at the very instant he realized she’d moved. She rammed it all the way to the hilt, its point jutting out, gleaming red above his glorious braids. She twisted the blade hard, breaking bones in his brainpan, taking no chances. A man could still kill you before he realized he was dead.

And then she jumped back, out of reach, pulling the dagger free.

Enki dropped to his knee, dropped flat on his face. Someone in the circle of Tafok Amagez shouted, but Karris barely heard it.

She stepped forward again, now that she saw he wouldn’t attack, and knelt at his body. She pulled back his braids and took the scimitar from his twitching fingers. Taking a fistful of braids, she stood, lifting the body to put pressure on the neck, and hacked with the dead man’s own scimitar. Once, and then twice, and a bit of quick sawing for the last of the skin, and Enki’s head came free of his body.

Karris held the head high in one hand and the scimitar high in the other, and suddenly, she could hear the crowd again, a vast roar of confusion and horror and awe and disbelief and cheering all intermixed. “Orholam has seen! Orholam’s justice has been done!” she shouted. But her voice was probably lost in the roar.

“I am Karris Guile, and this man is Gavin Guile, your Prism. He is Gavin Guile!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs, but it was lost in the clamor of fifty thousand voices. Only the nearest could hear. She could only hope it was enough.

She switched hands and swung the head back and forth as she drafted off the banners nearby. She flung the head and gave it a little extra push with luxin as she threw it.

Karris couldn’t have made the shot so perfectly if she’d tried it a hundred times. The head flew all the way into Eirene Malargos’s box and landed in the Nuqaba’s lap.

The Nuqaba began shrieking, and Orholam forgive them, many in the audience laughed.

Karris didn’t care. She moved to Gavin quickly and cut him free as the Tafok Amagez stood around, baffled.

Oh, Orholam. Gavin’s face. His face!

“Gavin,” she said, “we have to run. Can you—”

“I won’t let you down,” he said, but when he stood, he almost collapsed. He put his left hand up to his face, and two of his fingers were gone. Those fucking animals.

But what mattered now was that Gavin was in no shape to fight.

Karris steadied him. Around her, the Tafok Amagez looked uncertain as to what they should be doing. She had won a trial that their Nuqaba had established, so they should let her go, but then, she’d also thrown the head of one of their leaders into the Nuqaba’s lap, so, should they arrest her? Could they, after what she’d just done?

There was no point in waiting to find out what they decided.

But just then, one of the hippodrome guards ran to the steps of the spina. “It is Gavin Guile!” he shouted. “I recognize him from the old days! They dyed his hair and dirtied his face, but he is Gavin Guile!”

Karris veritably pulled Gavin down the steps, and the soldier fell in with them, desperately signaling to other Guile family troops to join them.

“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shrieked suddenly. “Kill them both!” Karris shot a look over at her. She was covered with blood. More blood than you’d think would leak out of a man’s severed head. She’d smeared it somehow on her face.

“No! Ignore that order!” Eirene Malargos shouted. “You’re not in your right mind, Haruru!”

“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shouted. “Block the exits! That’s an order!”

“That’s an act of war! I forbid it!” Eirene Malargos shouted.

Chaos.

“This way!” the Guile soldier said.

He unlocked a door set at the level of the sand. They stepped through and he closed it behind them, locking it.

“Captain Eutheos, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. “I thought I ordered you out of here.”

“Wasn’t much good at orders at Blood Ridge either, my lord.”

Gavin laughed briefly at some shared memory, then cut off abruptly, as if anything that made his face move spawned such pain that it nearly felled him.

“I can get us to an exit, but they’ll get there faster,” the soldier said.

“There has to be some kind of service exit,” Karris said.

“First thing they’ll think of,” Gavin said. And he was right. Dammit.

“Can you get us to the top tier, west side?” Karris asked.

“Absolutely.”

And he did. They dodged through corridors where only servants and slaves went, and crossed halls clogged with spectators eager to get out—the sight of men drawing swords and pistols and drafting and ready to kill anyone who opposed them did crazy things to people. Other people, who’d been outside the hippodrome and heard that amazing things were happening within were pushing to get in, creating vast snarls. One musket shot and this was going to turn into a stampede.

The Guile soldiers manning the exits were shouting, trying to bring order, but they were confused themselves. Were the Tafok Amagez now the enemy? Or were they still friends who should be helped? What had happened inside?

Gavin collapsed several times, apologizing each time. Karris and Eutheos ended up each taking a shoulder—another thing that being short made her ill-suited for. He was shockingly light.