The Blinding Knife

by Brent Weeks

  But then, he’d been not a drafter for his whole life, and only a drafter for a couple months. Nothing was instinctive yet. He pushed the thought, the worries, his mother’s lies, away.

  The card box smelled of cherry cavendish, tobacco like fruit leather. Janus Borig had hidden her most valuable cards in her tobacco. And it had worked. Funny old coot.

  Kip had liked her.

  His quick grin faded. Orholam. She was dead. Murdered.

  By Andross Guile. A soul-deep loathing settled in him. He stood. Go right to the gut, Kip. See if the man only has the balls to hire murderers. Kip put the card box on the table. Don’t stop moving, Kip. Weakness and fear beckoned. He tossed his knife on the bed. It was safer here than anywhere.

  He went out the door. “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he told the skinny Ilytian standing guard by his door. He wanted to tell the man to guard that room with his life, but anything Kip said like that would sound melodramatic, hysterical. Besides, who was going to break into the commander of the Blackguard’s room?

  Kip hadn’t seen or heard any signal, but before he got to the lift, Samite fell in place beside him. She was still buckling her ataghan belt.

  “You’re not trying to stop me?” Kip asked as they got on the lift.

  “Not a Blackguard’s place to stop her charges from making mistakes.” Though her tone was light, Samite didn’t grin.

  Kip set his jaw, hunkered into himself. He thought about Janus Borig. I am not going to be afraid. She deserves better. When they arrived, he knocked firmly on Andross Guile’s door. The door opened after a few moments, and Grinwoody appeared. With the open door, Kip heard harp music float out.

  “I need to speak with him,” Kip said.

  “The High Luxlord is occupied.”

  “Now, Grinwoody.”

  The Ilytian’s unpleasant expression turned angry at Kip using his real name.

  “Now, Wormwood!” Kip said.

  Grinwoody turned his back and closed the door. Kip stuck his foot in the crack. The man looked at him, furious.

  “Try to throw me out, you simpering worm,” Kip said. “Try.”

  Grinwoody looked from Kip to Samite. “The young master will keep the drapes closed,” he said. Then he disappeared into the darkness of the spider’s hole.

  “You see superviolet?” Kip asked Samite.

  “No.” Her tone carried a slight accusation: If you’d needed someone who could see superviolet, you could have said so, knucklehead.

  “My fault. Wait out here. If they kill me, you’ll know who did it.” Drafting his own superviolet torch, Kip went inside, not waiting for permission.

  He almost collided with Andross Guile.

  “You are not to come here without permission!” Andross shouted. He swung a slap at Kip. Kip dodged.

  “You fucking murderer!” Kip shouted back in his face.

  The harpist, a young woman sitting in the chair Kip usually occupied, stopped playing, looking terrified in the darkness.

  “What?” Andross demanded.

  “You killed Janus Borig, you fucking coward!”

  There was a swift motion behind Kip. He hadn’t even noticed Grinwoody slipping around him, and in an instant both of Kip’s arms were knocked down, twisted, and put in elbow locks. Kip lost the superviolet and was plunged into blindness. He was driven to his knees.

  “Janus Borig? How do you know her?” Andross demanded.

  “You killed her! I just came from her house!” Kip was suddenly jagged, powerless, a furious child. Damn me, a furious child.

  “Why would I kill Janus Borig?” Andross Guile asked.

  “She gave me the black cards I used to beat you!”

  “You think I’d kill a demiurge over a card game? Where was she? She was here? On the Jaspers?”

  “Don’t lie to me! You knew she was here. You’ve had me followed everywhere I go.”

  “I have? And every bad thing that happens in the world is my doing? What a simple world you live in,” Andross Guile said. “She was killed? You’re certain of this.”

  Kip realized suddenly that he was on the verge of making a tremendous mistake. Anything he said could give Andross Guile information he hadn’t had before. Even coming here did that. “Why should I believe you didn’t kill her?” he said.

  “Because she did me two great favors a long time ago,” Andross said. “We were friends, for a time. She had a history of that, you know. Befriending people, using them for her art, and then disappearing. She was doubtless using you, too.”

  No, she hadn’t been doing that. Not to Kip. Lies. “What favors?”

  “She was making new Nine Kings cards. Did she not—No, of course she wouldn’t have told a child. She made my card first.”

  “So?”

  “You’ve never seen the true cards, have you? The cards let a drafter live the memories of those they depict—but only up to the moment when the cards were drawn. Janus Borig enshrined me as important enough to deserve a card, and did it without threatening me. At best, an enemy could learn my thoughts and plans as of what, twenty-eight years ago? I am the only important person alive to whom those new cards are not a threat.”

  Which meant he would want Janus Borig to finish as many of her other cards as possible. Of course he would do anything to get his hands on the final product, but he wouldn’t kill her before she finished.

  “And the second favor she did you?” Kip asked. He was deflating, though, defeated already.

  “You tell me what happened, and I’ll tell you.”

  Kip slumped, and Grinwoody released him. “I went to her home tonight—”

  “Where?”

  “On Big Jasper.”

  “Where?”

  Kip told him. “When I got there, the house was on fire. The whole neighborhood was trying to put it out before it spread. They thought it was a lightning strike, but they found her a couple streets over, with no cloak, and stab wounds all over her. I could barely even recognize her.” If Kip had gotten there late, even if Janus Borig had taken something out of the house, there was no way to tell who might have found her first, who might have stolen what she had.

  “Did you see anyone suspicious?” Andross asked.

  “You know what?” Kip said. “Forget it. I’m not trading with you. You’re better at this game. I don’t need to play.”

  Kip drafted a superviolet torch and saw that Samite was standing behind Grinwoody, the point of a knife a finger’s breadth from the back of his neck. In the utter darkness. She was that good.

  “She gave me my card, Kip,” Andross Guile said. “So I could see exactly what was in it. She could make copies, of course, but they’re always weaker. She feared me. I know that. But I had no reason to hurt her.”

  And Andross Guile never did anything without a reason.

  Chapter 65

  ~Skirting the Issue~

  Tap. Superviolet-blue. Tap. Green. Tap. Yellow. Tap. Red, sub-red.

  The young Blackguard steps back from the precipice. The smell of burning homes, burning livestock, and burning human flesh wafts up from the valley floor.

  “I can make the jump, Commander,” he says. Skinny, long-legged, hair perpetually askew, Finer is the young man I hope will succeed me as commander one day. If this kind of mission doesn’t kill him. The boy says, “It’ll take us twenty minutes if we go down the trail.”

  Normally so decisive, I hesitate.

  “It’s not incarnitive, sir.”

  “It’s real damn close.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  What Finer has discovered is that if he stabs points of green luxin from the braces into his knees, it allows him to keep the luxin open, fluid. This itself is no great discovery, of course. As long as luxin is touching blood, it can be held open. But external, attached luxin with direct control? That’s perilously close to what wights do.

  With the seals held directly at his knees, Finer can run with the braces on and have them not encumber his motion, but when
he falls, he can close the weave. The stiff springiness of the green luxin will keep him from destroying his knees. It also seems that with the luxin inserted at his knees it reacts faster, instinctively opening or closing for what the body knows it needs.

  This is exactly what leads otherwise good men and women to become wights: the realization that luxin is better than flesh. At certain things. But the more you experiment with it, the greater a hold it gets on you. There’s always a good reason to use more.

  And yet.

  Orholam hates war, and yet he allows war in certain exigencies. So.

  “Do it,” I breathe.

  Finer pulls up the leg of his trousers and begins drafting green. He drafts braces of green luxin around his knees, stabs the points in, drafts a thick sheen around his thighs. Then more.

  Orholam’s balls, he’s coating his entire body. Going green golem.

  “Son,” I say, “you let it go once you get down.”

  Finer turns to me and grins a wild grin. “Yes…” he struggles, “… sir.” He grins again, gives a jaunty salute, and leaps off the precipice.

  The glorious sonuvabitch. He does a somersault on the way down.

  Chapter 66

  Back safely in Ironfist’s room, Kip studied the card box. It hadn’t been moved, of course. And Ironfist still wasn’t back. The box, the only thing that was left of Janus Borig’s life’s work, was made of olivewood and lacquered ivory inlaid with electrum. Kip rubbed his hands on his shirt to get as much of the oils off them as possible, then cracked open the box.

  The cards slid into his hand. Originals. He could see the tiny brushstrokes on them; the paint had a thickness to it, rising from the surface of the cards where details had been meticulously applied. But they weren’t just originals. The names on the cards were names—both people and game mechanic cards—that Kip knew had never been in the game before: Talon Gim, Deedee Falling Leaf, Izem Red, Orea Pullawr, The Prisoner, New Green Wight, Polychrome Wight, Orlov Kunar, Jing, Black Powder Charge, Luxin Grenadoes, Sea Demon Slayer, Flintlock, Shimmercloak, Heresy, Three-Eyed Ben, Usem the Wild, Ganesh the Bear—Kip stopped.

  Shimmercloak? Orholam’s balls. The painting depicted a sneering man with heavy brows: it was Vox. His gray cloak was visible at the neck where the chains bit into his throat, and then his body disappeared below that. The text read, “If Lightsplitter, grants invisibility except against sub-red and superviolet.”

  If Lightsplitter?

  Kip stared at the two cloaks drying by the fire. The cards were real. They were of real things, and they told the truth. They were new cards—and they were of people who had been alive recently. Kip knew some of those names had been drafters whom he’d seen at Garriston.

  And if the cards were of those who had recently been alive, it was possible that there were cards of those who were still alive.

  Kip began flipping through the cards faster, not trying to grab all the details, not trying to savor the art—he was hunting.

  The Fixer. The Shadow. Tala. Flamehands. Aheyyad Brightwater. Samila Sayeh. Halo Breaker. The Fallen Prophet. The Black Seer. Mirrorman. Mirror Armor. The Technologist. The Novist. The Color Prince.

  This wasn’t a deck. There weren’t multiple copies of the cards, such as one would use when playing so as to maximize your chances of that card coming up. This was an entire new set. Kip was looking for his father’s card. Where was it? What would it tell him?

  Zymun the Dancer. Kors Angier. Enervate. Incarnidine. Black Luxin. Hellstone Dagger. Multicolored Spectacles. The Angari Serpent. Andross the Red.

  Kip felt ice in his veins. It was a young Andross Guile, handsome, strong, a warrior, a white dagger in his hand, tattered cloak billowing around him, three young boys behind him, one to his right, the other to his left, one barely visible in the distance.

  Orholam, he looks like a hero.

  Putting the card aside, Kip kept going. The Color Prince’s Rifle. Rifle? Kip didn’t even know what the word meant. Not that that was terribly uncommon. Incarnidine? If he had time, he could probably figure some of them out from the pictures, but time felt compressed. Like someone was going to come along any moment and take the cards from him, and they’d be lost forever.

  Skimmer. Condor. Incendiary Musket. Gan Guvair. Helane Troas. Viv Grayskin. Yras the Caster. Iron Elm. Pleiad Poros. The Butcher of Aghbalu. Flashbomb.

  Again Kip stopped, went back. The Butcher of Aghbalu. The man was splattered with gore, a fiery scimitar in one hand, stylized blue fire around the other, no armor, just a torn, bloodied tunic, revealing massive ebony arms and shoulders. The bodies of the dead lay all around him, in a palace. The man was young, wearing no ghotra, his kinky hair worn in a braided style Kip had never seen before, but it was undeniably Commander Ironfist. Kip had thought Janus Borig was working on his card, a one-eyed man—and it hadn’t looked like this, but this was Commander Ironfist. Younger, but definitely him. Kip’s heart seized.

  The Butcher?

  Kip looked at the weapons rack on the wall. The scimitar from the card was there, at the top. Spine blackened, blade shining. Garnets and scrimshaw, turquoise and abalone.

  Part of him wanted to draft and jump into that memory instantly, but he didn’t. He needed to go through all the cards before someone interrupted him. Surely someone was looking for him, surely he couldn’t be allowed to know everything; it was somehow too easy.

  He tucked that card away with the others he wanted to examine later and shuffled through the rest quickly. The Butcher of Ru was the next card, the art paired with Ironfist’s card. Kip’s stomach turned. He knew about General Gad Delmarta’s massacre. On that card, the grinning man on the front was swinging a man’s head by its braided Atashian beard in one hand, and a woman’s head by her long black hair in the other. Kip thought about what would happen to his mind if he jumped into that card. If he became General Delmarta, what would he see? What if getting into that mind wasn’t terribly difficult?

  This was living history. He could learn things from these cards that no one else knew, that no one else had any way of knowing. And even if Kip wasn’t a real polychrome and couldn’t draft his extra colors consistently, he could see them, which meant he could know the whole story of every one of them—as only a few other people in the world possibly could. Whoever controlled these cards would control the truth. This wasn’t just a treasure with a titanic monetary value, it was insight; it was a stripping bare of lies.

  Anyone in power would want it for what it could tell them about their enemies. Anyone with a secret would want to destroy it lest their enemies find it.

  Anyone with a secret. Like being the Butcher of Aghbalu?

  A black cloud demon of smoky despair ripped Kip’s mouth open and crawled into his throat. Commander Ironfist had been the one man Kip thought he could trust. And now Kip was in his room, with treasures, vulnerable.

  “It’s not me,” a deep voice said behind Kip.

  Kip jumped, so startled he flung priceless cards both left and right.

  “My apologies,” Ironfist said. “Thought you might have fallen asleep waiting for me. Didn’t want to wake you.” He knelt to help Kip pick up the scattered cards.

  He scowled at the very first one he picked up. Looked over at Kip. “These are… real?”

  “Yes, sir.” Kip finally got up and started helping the commander gather up the cards.

  They stood, and Commander Ironfist handed Kip a stack of the cards. He kept one in his hand. “I’ve never seen originals before. Does it work? Like they say?”

  “Yes, sir. If you draft while you touch it, you experience what they did. The more colors you can draft, the more you see.”

  Ironfist looked at the card in his hand. “This card. This is my brother, you know him?”

  Kip nodded. Tremblefist.

  “When my mother was assassinated—it’s complicated. She’d been keeping me away from the Chromeria, and with her death the reasons for keeping me away died, too. Our father was gone,
and we had a dey to rule. Both my brother and I were gifted, my sister was too young, so one of us had to stay home to rule. My brother was younger, but I was more gifted, and we had good advisers who would actually do most of the ruling for him. We thought that if I could become a full drafter, in the future I would have more pull with the Chromeria. After I came home, my brother would then take his turn at the Chromeria. So my brother stayed home. To stabilize his rule, we decided he should marry. The Tiru had the best claim, and we should have appeased them. Our advisers told us as much. But we were young men, and though the Tiru’s candidate was not ugly, she was not a beauty to make the heart race either. We were young fools, and I cared what my brother thought. We chose the Tlaglanu princess Tazerwalt because she was prettier than any of the other candidates by far. Her tribe was hated, and though she fell madly in love with Hanishu—pardon, that was my brother’s name, before—even though she loved him and respected him, she was haughty before everyone else. Despised them. It made them hate her more, and made them hate him, too. The competing Tiru had crippled her father during a raid when he was still young, and she was no peacemaker. She took every opportunity to snub and shame them.”

  He sighed, but continued, “I had just finished my training when the False Prism’s War began. There was no question that we would support Gavin. Dazen made some abortive overtures to Paria, but we were too deeply indebted to Andross Guile and his father Draccos Guile to take those overtures seriously. You wouldn’t know it from Gavin’s coloring, but no small amount of Parian blood flows in the Guile veins. Anyway, we sent our entire army, and still Andross demanded more. Most of the palace guards went. They ended up barely making it in time, but that’s another story.

  “Seeing this weakness, the Tiru tribesmen came from the mountains and infiltrated the capital city of our dey, Aghbalu, as civilians, and then one day when my brother went out hunting with fifty of the few remaining soldiers with him, the Tiru attacked.