The Broken Eye (116 page)

“Defensive positions, people!” Cruxer said.

Kip and Tisis presented their hands and the luxiat lifted a pitcher and washed them of metaphorical sin. When he saw that Kip’s hands were smeared with literal blood, he gulped. Kip felt Ferkudi put something on his head and saw that the young man had crafted green luxin crowns for both of them.

“You are here of your own free will?” the luxiat asked.

“Yes,” Kip and Tisis said quickly. Kip realized he’d barely even looked at her since he’d gotten here.

“Have either of you promised yourself to anyone else?”

“No,” Tisis said.

“No,” Kip said, a heartbeat late.

“Touch your right hands and entwine your fingers.”

“Wait!” Ben-hadad said. He waved his hands and almost fell over, having to hop on his good foot to regain his balance. “A Ruthgari wedding can be considered illegitimate and annulled if there’s no fire. Water, wine, and fire to sanctify a marriage. You need them all.”

The whole squad started looking around for a torch. How hard could it be to find a torch in the middle of a thousand merchants?

“Ah, hells,” Kip said. He opened himself to the sun and raised his own left hand, letting power roar through him. Fire gushed out of his hand skyward.

He must have been a bit tense, because it leapt out much farther than he meant, a pillar of fire ten paces high for a moment, before he tamped it down.

“Flesh protuberance,” Ferkudi said.

“Ferkudi!” Cruxer said. “Position! And shut it!”

“Lightbringer indeed,” Big Leo murmured.

“On with it!” Kip said. If the Lightguard hadn’t known where exactly to find him before, they certainly would now.

The luxiat picked up the cup. He’d apparently dropped it when Kip painted the sky with fire. He filled it from a skin with wine. “The wine is Orholam’s gift. The shared cup signifies the joys and sorrows of the life you will share.” He guided them to each drink, the cup held awkwardly in their clasped right hands. “Even the awkwardness you feel is an emblem of your new—”

“Just drink and say the oath,” Cruxer said.

“Kip Guile, Breaker,” Tisis said, needing no prompting from the luxiat, staring Kip in the eyes. “Your life shall be my life, through all the dawns and noons and dusks and nights Orholam grants us. My light is yours. With my body, I thee worship.”

Kip blinked for a moment, because he could tell she meant it. “Tisis Antonia Malargos,” Oh, Orholam, it was like he was outside of his own body. He saw the Lightguards, pushing through the crowd. They were within musket range now. “Your life shall be my life, through all the dawns and noons and dusks and nights Orholam grants us. My light is yours. With my body, I thee worship.”

And it was done. Kip had bound his will to this. It was finished. He was married.

The luxiat said quickly, “May there never be darkness between you. I declare you husband and wife.”

“Go!” Cruxer shouted. “Go, go, go!”

Kip saw Teia squeeze her hood shut, covering all but her glistening eyes, then she turned her back, and the black-and-white disks on her cloak rolled together, eclipse and darkness.

Kip and Tisis ran the other way. Big Leo had slung Ben-hadad over his shoulder and was pounding down the dock already, barely slowed by the weight. Kip followed, but it was as if the world had been drained of sound. They sprinted down a dock, and the Lightguards ran after them. Kip poured red luxin across the width of the dock in a wide swath, even his pounding heart silent in his ears.

The Lightguards pulled up short in front of the red luxin, none of them drafters, none of them willing to die. They fired their muskets, splintering wood around the running squad. Kip turned and drew his pistol, but saw the crowd of innocents behind the Lightguards. If he missed …

He holstered the pistol and ran up the gangplank to the galleass. The Lightguards had found sheets of wood to throw on top of the red luxin, and they charged across. Finally gathering their courage, or thinking Kip was too far away to throw more red luxin, the Lightguards ran the rest of the way down the dock, rapidly closing the distance to the departing ship.

Kip stood on the stern gallery and shot the pistol at the Lightguards. He threw luxin, the squad shouting at him to get down, calling him insane. One word worked its way through: Teia. Kip looked into sub-red and Teia moving among the Lightguards.

She attacked no one. Merely bumped an elbow here just as a musketeer fired, extinguished a slow match there, tangled men in the lines on the deck as they ran about, causing several to fall.

Kip had been throwing death right at her.

Cruxer pulled Kip down and behind cover, berating him for risking himself when there was no longer any reason to do so, but Kip didn’t even hear him. Teia.

Their ship passed the cannon tower guarding the bay, and they saw the Lightguards flashing mirrors at it, signaling, no doubt, to fire. But the cannons were silent. Silent until, suddenly, the entire battery blew up in a concussion that shook the earth and sea.

Explosion layered on explosion. Cannons and muskets and a falling wall.
Card after card. But they passed as fast as he saw them.

“Tremblefist, no,” Kip said.

And oddly, at the sound of his own voice, Kip was back. He could hear again, and his eyes lost the intense, singular, war-blind focus. He saw his squad: Cruxer, and Ferkudi, and Ben-hadad, and Big Leo, and Winsen. Teia gone, and in her place Tisis. And he saw himself, madly dealing death to enemies he didn’t have to fight at all. And he saw his two faces: child and warrior, man and leader. Kip, who wanted to sit and cry and be taken care of; and Breaker, who was responsible for taking care of others. Karris said that to take up the latter didn’t mean to deny that the former existed.

Kip took a deep breath, then he popped his neck to the left and the right, and when he turned, he was Breaker.

“Breaker, my lord, what’re our orders?” Cruxer asked.

“This ship is going to Rath, but when it lands, we won’t be on it,” Breaker said.

“What?” Tisis asked.

“Ben-hadad, you’ve been on skimmers and sea chariots. Design one big enough for the squad. Tisis, you have people aboard?”

“Of course. But what are you—”

“Then it’s your choice. You can come with us, or you can take that signed contract to your sister Eirene without me. Our alliance and our wedding stands, but I have no intention of getting trapped in Ruthgar. I will help your family, but I won’t be its hostage. I’ll help your family by defending your satrapy. We’re going to Blood Forest. We’re going to stop the Color Prince. The Mighty are going to war.”

Chapter 97

When no one answered the door at the chirurgeons’ house, Ironfist broke it down. There was no one inside. Neither the chirurgeons, nor the Blackguards, nor Gavin Guile. There was no note, no sign of a struggle.

“They’re gone,” a voice said outside, behind him. “I’ve been waiting for you.” And then Grinwoody stepped into the house.

“Grinwoody,” Ironfist said.

Grinwoody waved a hand. “That’s not necessary, not here, not today.”

“Uncle,” Ironfist said, cracking a grin. The men embraced.

“You understand there was nothing I could do about
this
,” Grinwoody said. He gestured to the emptiness.

“Is he alive?” Ironfist asked.

“Gavin, yes. The Blackguard who was here protecting him and the chirurgeons, no. Andross will … No, even after all these years, I don’t know what Andross will do with Gavin. Imprison him until he breaks? Kill him when Gavin disrespects him, as he inevitably will? Elevate him for some purpose? I have no idea. Still.” He said it with frustrated admiration, as of an adversary who had fought for so long and so well that they were nearly friends.

Ironfist said, “I was there, within steps of that old scorpion. I could have … Did I fail you, uncle? Did I fail my
Ulta
? After all this time, and how high I rose.” He expelled a great breath.

“Do you have it?”

“The White had it hidden just where you said.” Ironfist handed over the polished ziricote-wood box, no wider than his hand and only a few thumbs deep. “I found no key.”

“Your commander’s pin,” Grinwoody said. Ironfist gave it to him, and Grinwoody snapped the pin between his fingers. Ironfist flinched, but Grinwoody wasn’t done. The halves hadn’t split randomly. He took one half and stuck it into the lock. It fit.

A line around the box glowed briefly.

Grinwoody said, “Throwing away your life to kill some noble was never to be your Ulta. There were … questions about your loyalty. Questions you’ve quite answered now.” He opened the box a crack and exhaled reverently, then closed it. “They call us masters of secrecy, and yet in dazzling the eye with lying light, the Chromeria is without rival. They say you’re the Blackguard because your skin is black, because your clothes are black, because in wearing no color, you show that your allegiance is to none of the Colors. They say you are Blackguards because you surrender your own light of reason to serve as a slave, that you are like the black-robed luxiats in taking on the humility of colorlessness. They say you serve in the dark. They say a hundred things that are all true—all to obscure one, central truth: you are called the Blackguard because you guard the black. The black seed crystal. Accessible only with the cooperation of the White and the commander of the Blackguard both. It is the weapon that kills Prisms and quenches luxin. This is the tool that will rebuild the Order. This is the pen that rewrites history. This, nephew, was your Ulta. You have succeeded. You’ve done more for the Order of the Broken Eye than anyone in three centuries.”

Why then was Ironfist ashamed? Ashamed that Grinwoody hadn’t trusted him. Ashamed that for some few months, he’d thought he didn’t have to choose sides, thought that his two oaths could be fulfilled without betraying either one, that ancient enemies could be made allies as they fought a common enemy, that his Ulta might be to kill the Color Prince. He took off his ghotra. Too late for that now. Orholam had reached out to Ironfist, and Ironfist had just spat in his face. “What do we do now?” Ironfist asked, without inflection.

“How we direct all the resources of the Order hinges on your answer to one question, my nephew and my right hand: after all you’ve seen, who is Kip Guile?”

Ironfist looked at his uncle, the slave, the hidden Old Man of the Desert, the head of the Order of the Broken Eye, and he could almost see fates being written as he chose his words. “He is not Kip Delauria, bastard, that I know. Nor is he Kip Guile. He is the Breaker, he is the Lightbringer, and he is our Diakoptês come again.”

“Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”

Epilogue 1

The distant explosion’s roar raced through Big Jasper’s broad avenues and lightwells, between the arches of its Thousand Stars, past whitewashed homes and gleaming domes. The cheering throngs along the Sun Day parade route fell silent, and every eye looked to the horizon, Ironfist’s eyes first of all.

Ironfist’s bitter regrets and introspection blew away with the last echoes of the great blast, and a rippling cloud billowed upward somewhere near the docks, so intensely hot and huge that it folded in on itself like a mushroom cap. There was only one place on that side of the island that held enough black powder to make an explosion so huge. He ran.

With his height and constant training and knowledge of every back street on this island, the half league passed in no time. Crowds coming and going both slowed his pace as he reached the narrow peninsula. Promachos Andross Guile’s Lightguards were trying to set up a perimeter, and doing a predictably bad job of it.

As Ironfist approached the line—were those idiots keeping out chirurgeons?—he couldn’t help but stare at the dissipating black cloud and the rubble beneath it. The explosion had come from the cannon tower that guarded the harbor. The tower’s powder stores were sunk into its bedrock bowels so that even an invading navy’s fire couldn’t hit them. Carver Black, in charge of the island’s defenses, was meticulous in checking that appropriate discipline in storing and working around so much black powder was maintained.

Of course, with the Lightguards having taken over, those clumsy fools might have begun storing the powder above ground. A dropped lamp, an iron-nailed boot—if you let discipline slip for a heartbeat, this kind of accident could happen.

But Ironfist knew in his gut that this was no accident.

The Lightguards tried to bar him from the peninsula, but he said, “I’m Commander Ironfist, let me pass.”

He actually forgot that it wasn’t true anymore until the words were out of his mouth. He’d been commander so long, it was impossible to think of himself as anything else.

They moved immediately. So they hadn’t heard yet.

The cannon tower was still standing. Reinforced with iron and Orholam only knew what kinds of luxin, the outer walls were cracked in some places, but otherwise intact. The blast, thus contained, had shot up from the cellar through each of the five floors, hurling everything out the top, transforming the cannon tower into a cannon aimed at heaven. Everything within had been flung into the sky: broad paving stones that had made the floors, splintered wood, rags, and, nearer to the tower itself, even the massive cannons themselves.

The entry door had been blown out into the harbor, and heavy smoke roiled out of it still. Civilians and Lightguards alike surrounded the tower, looking for survivors, surveying the damage, counting the dead. Ironfist saw a corpse, legless, charred, his clothes blown entirely off him. Others bobbed in the waters. But of most of the dead, there was almost nothing left. A boot here, a piece of meat unidentifiable there. Blood smears.

Ironfist found a corpse, dead not from the explosion, but of a slash through the neck. It could have been from flying shrapnel, but the man had no burn marks or evidence of injury from the concussion wave. He’d been lying here when the explosion happened, already dead.