The Broken Eye (29 page)

And then he broke.

And he wept.

And she held him. And they wept together.

And after five minutes, the accursed bell jingled. And he stood. And he begged her forgiveness. And he kissed her lips.

And he slew her.

And with her died his faith in Orholam. It had survived war and abandonment and massacres and deceit, but it could not survive the holiest night of the year.

It was midnight. He had killed one hundred drafters.

Three hundred and twenty-seven to go.

Thirty hours later, Gavin killed the last man just before the sun rose. And he went to his chambers, and for the first time since he’d brought hell to earth, he drafted black luxin.

Chapter 25

Kip took the lift down to head out to the Blackguards’ training yard, but when he got to the ground floor, he couldn’t force himself to get out. He was overwhelmed with people, with having just faced down his grandfather. He was trembling.

He’d figured out in his weeks coming back to the Chromeria that with both Kip and Gavin being lost to the waves, the Red wasn’t going to let the blame for it land on his own shoulders. Nor would he be deprived of the services of his favorite slave, Grinwoody. That meant whatever story he’d invented blamed Kip.

Knowing he would have to answer for the crime he had tried to prevent, Kip had prepared as well as he could, charting a course whereby he might find some rapprochement with the man who’d probably accused him of murder and treason.

When he got off the boat, he’d asked the first person he’d seen what had happened to Gavin.

Regardless, going into that meeting should have been the prelude to imprisonment and execution. Kip still wasn’t sure why it hadn’t been. Part of what he’d been betting on was that Andross was a wight. And he wasn’t. Not anymore.

Andross still wore his hood. Still wore his dark spectacles, but Kip had known, instantly. There was something different about his voice, and he hadn’t been wearing gloves.

Kip’s best card had suddenly disappeared. He’d planned to threaten to reveal that. If nothing else, before they took him away to prison, he could yank back Andross Guile’s hood to show the man for what he was.

In the chamber, Kip hadn’t had a moment to think about the further implications: a man had gone wight, and was now a wight no longer? Impossible.

Kip had merely spoken, weaving lies with a facility he didn’t know he had, so befuddled and intrigued by the puzzle that he’d forgotten to be befuddled and overwhelmed by addressing the entire Spectrum.

And it had worked. Somehow.

There had been a little spark of joy dancing at the corner of Andross Guile’s mouth. Surprise, but then pleasure. Like he enjoyed playing against a worthy opponent. Maybe that was why he’d let Kip off the hook, simply so they could keep playing.

Kip felt suddenly ill. He was alive because of Andross Guile’s mercy? No, not that. He was alive because Andross longed for entertainment. There. That was more in line with the old horror. That made sense.

But now, suddenly, the people he should most want to see—his Blackguard compatriots—he couldn’t bear to see, and he couldn’t have even said why. He took the lift down, and down. He got off at the level where the Prism had his private training room. Kip had lost the key Commander Ironfist gave him long ago, but the door had a superviolet panel next to it. Kip had never really noticed them before—they were flat black, and only a few thumbs wide. He’d dismissed them, not realizing what they were, but he realized they were made of the same stuff as the Prism’s room controls.

After gathering some superviolet, Kip extended it into the panel. Ah, there was another lock inside, so that the door could be locked against superviolets as well, but it wasn’t locked now. Kip pressed superviolet in, and the mundane lock popped open. He went inside.

The silence was a balm. He wrapped his hands in long strips of cloth the way Ironfist had taught him. The old widow Coreen had given him clothes, and while they weren’t exactly good for exercise, Kip knew that they would be replaced soon with Blackguard garb and a Chromeria discipulus’s clothes, so he set to work on the heavy bag.

He started slow. Seven to ten minutes, Ironfist said, to warm up your fists and joints to the shock of hitting. Kip bent his wrist on an errant punch. He grumbled. He’d done the wrappings wrong. But instead of untying the whole mess and trying again, he drafted a green luxin brace around his wrist. Then he went ahead and made a full glove out of it. He matched it on the other hand.

Much better. He punched the bag lightly for the seven minutes, his fists warming, the pain somehow welcome, the loss of thinking, thinking, thinking a relief.

He moved over to the stretch bag, a smaller target that when hit snapped back toward you, building reflexes. After he got used to its movement, he looked beyond it, using the periphery of his vision to react. Then he went to the chin-up bar, and found he could do three now. Three! It seemed both an impossible achievement and pathetic at the same time. Three. Then back to the heavy bag.

By some accident, he turned on the lights on the bag. It lit up sections to tell him his next target: right kidney, gut, left jaw. With each punch, the bag reacted to how hard Kip hit it by blossoming in color from his punches. Light touches lit the bag blue. Kip’s hardest kicks reached up to orange.

It wasn’t long before he was wheezing at the effort of trying to get the bag to turn red.

He braced his gloved hands on his knees. He was hitting the damned thing as hard as he could.

No, he was hitting as hard as he could muscularly. Magically, he should be able to hit it harder.

But he didn’t want to shoot his little green bouncy balls of doom across the room. If he could add his will to his muscles with magical stuff he threw, why couldn’t he add his will to his muscles?

He remembered the wights in Garriston, leapfrogging from roof to roof, shooting luxin downward as they jumped, using the back kick to extend their jumps. It was the same concept that worked for Gavin’s skimmers and the sea chariots. But both of those interacted more externally. They didn’t
have to
, did they?

Kip drafted a shinguard, then kicked off his shoes. This next part was going to hurt. It always did. He began kicking the heavy bag to warm up for it. He’d been shown how to put power into kicks a dozen times, but it hadn’t settled into body knowledge until today somehow. Maybe losing some weight had helped. He swung both arms in a guard to the left, letting his body stretch, his left foot turning until it pointed backward, hips opening, then jerked his arms back in, the torsion providing power as his right leg came up and pounded the side of the bag and set it swinging. That bag weighed two sevens. Not bad. He repeated it, not quite as successfully, from the left.

Enough warm-up. He filled himself with green luxin, then stabbed a bit of it through the skin at the back of his right heel. He winced, cut it wider.

Here goes nothing. He stood with his right foot back, twisted, snapped, and as his right foot came up, he shot green luxin out of it.

The sudden transfer of weight from his body into the air, but this time not opposing his body but aiding it, threw Kip’s foot forward at tremendous speed. He kicked the bag so hard that he lost traction on his left foot and fell heavily on his side.

Laughter burst out from the door.

Kip popped to his feet in an instant, mortified. It was half a dozen members of his Blackguard class, led by Cruxer, who was grinning big. If it was possible, it seemed like the young inductees had changed in the weeks Kip hadn’t seen them. Cruxer was bulking up, his tall, lean frame looking more muscular by the day. His eyes, though, looked five years older, either from the death of the girl he’d loved, Lucia, or from being in the Battle of Ru. Affable Big Leo’s arms of banded iron looked even bigger. Gross Goss wasn’t picking his nose, but he was itching it with a big thumb. Tiny Daelos didn’t look any bigger, but he was beginning to look reedy and not just skinny and small. Ben-hadad still had spectacles with flip-down lenses, but he’d reworked them. These didn’t look thrown together with string and glue; they looked a masterwork, a perfect complement to the burning bright intelligence in his eyes. Only Ferkudi looked the same, the craggy-nosed dope. Actually, that was deeply reassuring.

“Good thing Breaker fights better than he … uh, kicks,” Ferkudi said. “Kicking is part of fighting, though, isn’t it? Ah, that’s a real flesh protuberance.”

The kids laughed.

“Shut up, you nunks,” Cruxer said good-naturedly. He led as naturally as the first-place Blackguard in the class should. He bowed his head to Kip. “Godslayer.” He delivered it flat, so it could have been teasing or not. Or knowing Cruxer, he meant those who wished to take it as teasing to be able to do so, but he really meant it.

Son of a … Kip thought that nickname had died when he nearly had on the ship. “Crux. Wh—what are you doing here?”

“In the Prism’s practice room, you mean? They got so many recruits for the war training out in the yards, we Blackguards have been pushed into storage rooms and side rooms everywhere half the time. Teia somehow got us permission to use this one when the yards are full. I was going to cut her from the squad before that. She’s not so good, but after she got us
this
place—”

“Hey,” Teia said. Somehow she’d lifted a blue luxin dagger from Ferkudi and was now pressing the point to Cruxer’s kidney, smiling sweetly.

Cruxer grinned. “The insubordination around here.”

“I thought you’d—I thought you’d think I was a traitor,” Kip said. That was it, that was why he hadn’t been able to bear going out to them. These were the only people in his life who had made him feel like he belonged, and he thought they would have looked at him as an outsider, a traitor.

“Breaker, you’re impulsive, but you aren’t stupid. We didn’t believe for a heartbeat that you’d try to kill the Red. It’s ridiculous! You’re trying to become a Blackguard! Protecting Colors is part of what we do. You wouldn’t throw all that away. But if your father fell overboard, you jumping in after him without a thought? That’s you. Completely.”

Ouch. “How’d you … how’d you hear so fast?”

“Teia. Big gossip.”

“Hey,” Teia said. For some reason, she’d been glowering at Daelos, but she said nothing more.

Cruxer grinned again. “Commander Ironfist thought you’d be here. Said sometimes those who’ve been in battle are a little reticent when they first come back.”

“You weren’t supposed to share that last part, you oaf,” Teia said. “What were you doing there, Kip? With your foot?”

She looked eager to talk about training. Well she might, he supposed. She and Kip were going to talk about her being all bloody in town. But not now.

“You’re bleeding,” Cruxer said.

“Just an experiment,” Kip said.

They gathered around him. “Go on,” Ben-hadad said. He’d seemed uncharacteristically nervous until now, when his eyes lit up at the possibility of a new discovery.

So Kip explained, and then he kicked the bag again, showing them. When you used luxin from one site repeatedly, the body eventually adjusted and there was little blood. But the first few times, it acted like any mundane cut. A cloud of unsealed luxin and blood both shot out of his heel like smoke out of a gun barrel, and this time he didn’t lose his footing. He did nearly wrench his knee, though. The power was incredible.

But the bag lit up. Red.

Everyone stopped and looked at Kip.

“You could, uh, use this lots of ways,” Kip said. “You’d have to, um, figure out your own center of weight and everything, but if you shot some from your shoulders when you ran, you’d run faster. Or when you jumped, you could shoot some—”

“From your ass! You’d be the fart flyer!” Ferkudi shouted. He reminded Kip of an excitable puppy.

They laughed, but only briefly. They were all captivated by the thought of it.

“I was going to say from your hips,” Kip said. “I mean, if you did it from your feet, you’d probably flip over and fall on your head.”

“But
you
could do it from your ass if you want to, Ferkudi,” Teia said. “Might as well have a wide platform.”

They laughed again, then quieted.

Big Leo turned to Cruxer. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this. Is it forbidden?”

Cruxer shook his head. “It isn’t incarnitive, so I don’t see why it would be. On the other hand, if you were doing it all the time, you might burn through your life in no time.”

“But that’s true of any drafting,” Teia said. “Used judiciously, think of it. We’d be faster, stronger, jump farther.”

“This can’t be the first time anyone’s thought of this,” Kip said, suddenly embarrassed.

“Every brilliant discovery is obvious after someone’s made it,” Ben-hadad said.

“Did you really just come up with this?” Cruxer asked. “No one suggested it to you?”

Kip shrugged.

“He shall be a genius of magic,” Ben-hadad said quietly, as if quoting something. The rest of them stopped, looked at him, looked at each other. Kip could tell they’d talked about it among themselves before.

“Does this mean we’re going to have to fill ourselves full of holes?” Ferkudi asked.

Chapter 26

Aliviana Danavis stood high on the Great Pyramid of Ru, wrapping up teaching the women who would replace her. The four superviolet drafters who had been learning from Liv for the last four months were joined by Liv’s personal guards. That guard had been formed around the core of men who’d helped her seize this very structure during the liberation of Ru.

Phyros was Liv’s rock. Over six feet tall, wide as the sea. When they’d infiltrated the city, he hadn’t worn his lucky cape because it was too distinctive, but usually he didn’t go anywhere with it. It was the skin of a lion, the roaring mouth forming a cap for his head, the mane bunching around his shoulders. Over an alligator-leather vest with many straps, he wore a jade-and-turquoise belt that hooked with great, curving giant javelina tusks. The sheath for his belt knife was a hollowed-out sabre-cat’s fang. He claimed to have killed each of the beasts himself, armed only with that knife. He despised muskets and pistols, but otherwise didn’t have a favorite among weapons. He had two axes that looked like halberds with their hafts cut short in special slings on his back. Someday, he would craft a weapon from sea demon tooth, he said.