The Blinding Knife

by Brent Weeks

  “Um, sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could do better than that.”

  “You’re apologizing for the wrong thing,” Kip said. “I don’t belong at eighteenth, do I?” He’d put himself around twentieth.

  Teia cleared her throat. “You’re a polychrome, Kip. It makes a big difference. Huge, if you use it right.”

  Kip scowled. A polychrome. They’d guessed that for a while. A full-spectrum polychrome? That was different. Totally different. And yet, with missing the practicum every day, he didn’t have nearly the skills he should have. In truth, as Teia had told him, if he really was a full-spectrum polychrome, all sorts of things would be different. They wouldn’t let him be a Blackguard unless Gavin intervened—he was too valuable. And they would want him to marry, young. It still wasn’t understood what made drafters, but enough people believed that drafters had children who could draft that the pressure for drafters to have children was intense. And more intense for the more gifted. Unless you got as powerful as Gavin Guile, and you could do whatever you wanted and everyone else could go to hell.

  But he didn’t want to think about all that right now. He went back to looking at the rankings. “How’d you even arrive at this?”

  “Paying attention? Watching? First you have to take into account that everyone wants to finish as high as possible, but at least in the top fourteen. People also have friends that they don’t want to knock out of the top fourteen, so lots of times people won’t challenge three up from themselves if that’s where their friend is. Because win or lose, either they or their friend will lose their challenge token. That’s less important in the top ten where people will know they’re safe, but people heading for getting kicked out aren’t going to want to ruin their friends’ chances.” She started drawing lines. “Person at the bottom goes first, so they might challenge the weakest person in the three above them. So let’s say Idus at twenty challenges Asmun at eighteen because even though he is allowed to challenge Ziri at seventeen, he thinks he can beat Asmun and not Ziri. If he wins, he moves up and then takes on Winsen, hoping to get lucky. So now the new person at twenty is more likely to challenge Asmun who is now at nineteen, even though that’s only one place up.”

  “Why?” Kip asked. The numbers were spinning in his head.

  “Because Asmun’s already lost. He’s got no challenge token, so he knows he can’t make it in this season at all. He won’t fight as hard because there’s nothing at stake. See, you have to reshuffle the order every time someone wins, and keep track of who has and who doesn’t have their challenge token. That way you can skip the more difficult fights. But of course, we have to keep in mind that some people will feign weaknesses until the last week so they have an advantage.”

  “Like you.” That was why Teia had wanted Kip to take credit for the courier idea.

  “Yes, like me.”

  “Oh hell no,” Kip said. Talk about vast areas of lore he knew nothing about. “No, no, no, this is hopeless. I can’t figure this all out!” He stood up. “No, I’m tired. Forget this—”

  “Kip, if you don’t figure this out, you’re not going to make it into the Blackguard. You’re not a good enough fighter, so you need to be smarter than people who are better fighters than you. That is what people admired about Ayrad.”

  “The man who defeated all the other fighters in the Blackguard wasn’t admired because he was a good fighter? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Kip, he was able to figure out exactly how to finish last every month and still make it in. That means he was figuring exactly who would challenge whom and who would win those fights—every month. If he figured wrong once, he would have failed out early.”

  “So he’s admired for losing intelligently? That’s mad.”

  “He’s admired for knowing his friends and knowing his enemies and outwitting them all.”

  “So what happened to him?” Kip asked.

  “He became commander of the Blackguard and saved the lives of four different Prisms over the course of his career—and then someone poisoned him.”

  “So he wasn’t perfect,” Kip said grumpily.

  “He was perfect for twenty-four years. That’s a lot longer than most of us can even dream.”

  “Sorry,” Kip said. He could tell that somehow the dead commander meant a lot to Teia.

  “Don’t pout. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Hold on, before we do all that, I want you to take your papers. You keep on avoiding this. Look, all you have to do is sign them and we can take them to be registered tomorrow.”

  “Kip, don’t be an idiot.”

  Kip was so tired he wanted to cry. He lifted his hands helplessly.

  “What happens after you free me, Kip?”

  “Uh, you’re free?”

  “And poor.”

  “Didn’t we already talk about this?” Kip asked.

  “What happens when a slave gets into the Blackguard, Kip?”

  “They’re freed, sort of.”

  “They’re purchased, for a fortune. And as soon as a scrub passes the test, their contract goes into escrow until final vows. If you free me now, you get nothing.”

  “I don’t want to own you, Teia. It doesn’t feel right. Do you even want to be in the Blackguard?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “I don’t even know if I should believe you. You can’t tell me that you don’t, can you?”

  “What? I’m a slave, not a liar, Kip.”

  He scowled. “It’s more complicated than that, and we both know it.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy for a long moment, then the façade crumbled. One second she was all breezy confidence and happiness, and the next she looked terribly vulnerable and frightened. “Kip… I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Ever since you said you’d free me. You know that the first thing I felt was angry—at you? Because as soon as you won me, I stopped getting my lessons in how to draft paryl. I’ll get them again, but I’ll have to wait years. Nothing in my life changed except that, and I was mad at you. Stupid, huh? Kip, part of me tells me to take those papers and run to the registrar. To take my freedom while it’s sitting there in front of me. It tells me slave owners are notoriously fickle. Sorry.”

  “No offense taken,” Kip mumbled.

  “My family’s in debt, Kip. My mother did some bad things, and my father lost everything, including me and my sisters. He was a trader like I said, but his creditors won’t let him go on another voyage because they’re afraid he’ll flee, so he’s stuck working as a day laborer. With what he’s earning now, there’s no way he can pay off what he owes. He can’t afford to buy inventory to trade at home. If I take those papers now, I’m condemning him to poverty, and my sisters to early marriages to the first poor men my father can convince to take them.”

  “What happened?” Kip asked.

  “Please don’t ask me that.”

  But I already did ask—Oh, because she’s my slave, if I insist, she’ll have to answer. Kip said, “Forget it then. Sorry. You have a plan?”

  “Hold on to my title for a few more weeks. Then when I go through final vows, you give me a fifth of what the Blackguard pays for me. That way, we both get something—and you’ll need the money as badly as I do. I want to be a Blackguard anyway, Kip. There is nothing in life I want more. This way, the Chromeria pays us for it.”

  “That’s… sort of… brilliant,” Kip said.

  “And what’s the downside?” she asked.

  I don’t get to find out if you like me for me or if you like me because you need the money—until after final vows. But that was purely selfish, wasn’t it? He wanted her to pay for him to feel good about himself.

  “See?” she said. “But… I want you to swear something to me, Kip.”

  “Anything.”

  “Swear that you won’t sell me back to… that you won’t sell me. To anyone. I’ll serve you in our off hours, I don’t care. I’ve been a slave for years, I can do it for a few more weeks, just pro
mise that.”

  “I swear to Orholam,” Kip said, “on one condition.”

  She looked dubiously at him.

  “That you take half of what we get for your contract.”

  “Kip, you’re a terrible negotiator.” She grinned, and Kip was struck again by how different she was from Liv. Liv had lived in bitterness over her station, which had been unjust, but it hadn’t been as bad as being a slave. Maybe it was that Liv had seen how close a gloriously easy life had been, so she felt the sting of its loss. Or maybe Teia was simply naturally more positive, but if he had to go through bad and unfair stuff, he hoped that in the future he could be more like Teia and less like Liv. The thought somehow loosened something inside of Kip and he found himself both less angry with Liv and less interested in her. “I accept,” Teia said. “Now, quit grinning… to work!”

  Chapter 83

  Dazen passed the first unlit torch in the tunnel without touching it. A torch could be a trap. He pressed on through the tight confines of the tunnel, breathing deeply to try to keep himself calm. The tunnel wasn’t that tight, and the blackness wasn’t the dark. He could go through worse. He would go through worse, gladly, to get out of here.

  No going back. Never.

  Perhaps a hundred paces later, he came to another torch, and he paused. The light of his green luxin ball was feeble, and it was consuming his only luxin. He didn’t know how long it was going to have to last him. Hopefully only minutes, but just in case…

  He studied the torch like it was a serpent. The tunnel was too tight to comfortably carry a normal torch with the attendant open flames and dripping pitch. To carry a normal torch without burning yourself down here, you’d have to hold it directly in front of you. In his usual profligately drafting way, his brother had made lux torches, made of a mundane shaft of wood. The ends had panels of imperfectly drafted yellow, covered completely by a thin layer of luxin or glass or even waxed leather. Sealed against the air, the yellow luxin lay dormant. When you wanted light, you simply peeled back the sealant and had a perfect, single-spectrum yellow light source. Depending on how much air was allowed through and how well the yellow had been drafted, the lux torch could last from an hour to four hours. Hideously expensive to buy and horribly difficult to craft; his brother had liked to draft them to show off his superchromacy.

  This one was his brother’s work, no doubt. Of course, his brother must have done most if not all of the work on this prison himself. The lux torch was set in a simple iron bracket. Dazen squinted at the little piece of iron as if it held the mysteries of the universe. But it was just iron. The fit didn’t look particularly tight. It didn’t look like there was any way it could be some kind of a switch so that when he lifted the torch it would pop up and trigger a trap.

  But it felt wrong.

  Dazen cursed. And then he cursed some more. He liked hearing the sound of his words echo down the tunnel, disappear into the distance, rather than simply bounce back at him from a few feet away.

  “A little dumb to be hollering when you’re trying to escape, don’t you think?” a voice said.

  Dazen felt a shock run down his spine. For one long instant he thought it was all over. Then he recognized the voice.

  “Dead man,” he said.

  “But not as dead as you’ll be soon, I think,” the dead man said.

  “I thought you were back in your wall, where I left you. I don’t need you out here.”

  The dead man chuckled from the darkness. “Thought you could lose me so easily? You’re an amusing little man, Gavin Guile.”

  “No, you’re Gavin. You’re the dead man. I’m done with that. I’m done with losing. Now go away, I’m burning light here.”

  “Bet the torch is trapped.”

  Dazen snarled. “I know the torch is trapped!”

  But he didn’t know the torch was trapped. That was fear, paranoia. But he couldn’t shake it. Cursing quietly, over and over and over, he studied the torch. He couldn’t touch it.

  “Forget it,” the dead man said. “You’ve probably got fifteen minutes left with the green. You might make it, if you don’t sit around and talk to yourself.” He laughed again, mocking.

  Dazen stumbled down the hall. He was in bad shape. If he didn’t get sleep and real food soon…

  No, worry about that later.

  The tunnel curved slowly, and Dazen thought he was spiraling slowly upward. It felt like it was taking forever. It felt unbearable, but it couldn’t go on for too long, could it? How deep would Gavin have dug?

  “Deeper than you can dig out, of course,” the dead man said. “He was always that little bit smarter than you.”

  “Shut up!” Dazen’s leg folded and he fell. He caught himself, but it almost cost him his concentration. He almost lost the green ball.

  “You remember how you were father’s favorite? I wonder if Gavin’s his favorite now. You were always afraid father would realize how much smarter Gavin was than you, weren’t you?”

  “Shut up,” Dazen said weakly. Orholam, he’d almost lost his only light. He couldn’t imagine being trapped in utter darkness with only the voices in his head.

  “Why don’t you go back to that lux torch,” the dead man said from the darkness. “Your green might last that long. Of course, that lux torch might be dead. Been there a long time. They don’t last forever. Not even your brother’s.”

  The darkness was getting stronger, closing in around the little wan circle of green light. Green was supposed to make him feel wild, and strong. But even wild animals can have their hearts burst. And the feeling of strength isn’t the same thing as strength.

  Dazen hobbled on, because there was nothing else to do. His body was betraying him. Black spots swam before his eyes. He stumbled again, and this time he fell, barely cradling his dwindling green globe to his chest. He stood, shakily, and even the dead man was silent.

  Then, salvation.

  He saw another lux torch. He moved toward it slowly, carefully.

  “It’s trapped, you know that, right?” the dead man said. “I bet the last one wasn’t trapped. He probably is so much smarter than you that he knew you’d go past that one, and then get desperate. He’s got you figured pretty—”

  “Shut up! Shut up. Shut up!”

  The green ball was smaller than Dazen’s fist now. He had five minutes left, maybe.

  Still, he didn’t rush. He examined closely the iron bracket this torch sat in.

  “It won’t be a simple lever trap. Come now, Dazen would be more elegant than that, don’t you think? Dazen—”

  “I’m Dazen now!” Dazen hissed. But he didn’t even turn. He was right, it couldn’t be a simple lever trap. The bracket was solid. He stepped back and extended one finger and pressed on the bracket, ready to jump backward if anything happened.

  Nothing.

  He squinted his eyes, trying to see into the superviolet, but he couldn’t tell if he was failing or there was simply no superviolet luxin to see.

  He poked the torch. It shifted in the bracket and he jumped back. His leg betrayed him again and he tumbled to the floor, barely able to break his fall by pushing himself against the wall.

  But other than a complete loss of his dignity, nothing happened.

  “Loss of your dignity?” The dead man chortled. “You’re bloody, and dirty, and naked, you smell like shit, and you talk to yourself. What dignity do you have to lose?”

  “I want you to know,” Dazen said, “when I get out of here, you’re gone. I don’t need you anymore.”

  “ ‘Need’ is such an interesting word, isn’t it?”

  “Go to the evernight.” Dazen stood wearily. “Let’s see what you’ve got, brother,” he said. He grabbed the lux torch.

  And. Nothing. Happened.

  He expelled a breath. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it. Orholam damn you, Gavin, I really thought you were that diabolically clever.

  Dazen pulled back the little clay tab over one square face of the lux torch
and a slow glow began emanating as the air got in through its many tiny holes. The torch was still half full of yellow luxin. With the quality of Gavin’s drafting, that would be plenty.

  Hope broke over Dazen’s heart like the sun breaking over the hills as that pure yellow light blossomed. He jostled the lux torch and the light bloomed full. He peeled off another clay face and basked in the glow. There was no trap.

  He was really going to make it. He’d dug a fathom below that bastard’s petard.

  Drafting from luxin was horridly inefficient. The light being cast was cast because the luxin had been drafted incorrectly, so the only correct yellows you got were those shed through spectral scattering, and even then, your own abilities and efficiency as a drafter dictated what was possible. But Dazen wasn’t trying to draft something useful; he merely wanted to taste yellow.

  It leaked into him in a slow swirl, and after sixteen years of its absence, it was glorious. He felt sharper, clearer, able to go on, carefully.

  The bare fact that Gavin hadn’t booby-trapped this lux torch didn’t mean that there weren’t traps in the tunnel. Even if he’d never guessed that his brother would get out this way, he might have worried that someone would find it from the other end. Yes, he’d have to be careful.

  Thank you, yellow.

  Invigorated, Dazen walked on.

  Not three minutes more, and he saw the rays of the lux torch illuminate the mouth of a chamber. He slowed.

  “This will be where he gets you,” the dead man said.

  “Shut up,” he hissed.

  He examined everything minutely. The walls of his tunnel before it emerged into the chamber; the floor; the ceiling—anything he could see, in every spectrum. His heart pounded, but there was nothing, no hidden tripwires, no hinges, no inexplicable holes in the wall that would shoot out some kind of gory death. He edged forward slowly. He could take his time. The torch would last.

  Of course, his brother could be coming at any moment.

  The chamber was perhaps ten paces wide in either direction. There was a small table, small chair, small cot. No food, though. This must have been a room where Gavin rested while he constructed the prison.