The Blinding Knife (Lightbringer)

by Brent Weeks

  Kip finally found a position floating on his back where his buoyancy and one flailing arm mostly kept him afloat and able to breathe. Almost every swell would crest over his head, but if he breathed at the right time, he wouldn’t inhale water.

  He shouted, “Help! Man overboard!” But he had no hope that the flagship was going to hear him. It was only now lighting up and beginning to turn. A ship of that size wasn’t going to get back to Kip for ten or fifteen minutes, if it ever found him at all. If any Blackguards had jumped into the water after him, Kip couldn’t see them. More to the point, they wouldn’t be able to see him unless he was lucky enough to get a sub-red.

  Kip tried to fight the panic clamping down on his chest. It made it hard to breathe. He took a wave at the wrong time and hacked and coughed to clear his lung, almost losing his father’s body. Dear Orholam. Dear Orholam, no.

  Gavin Guile was dead. Dead. Dear Orholam, no. Father, why? Why’d you do it?

  When he regained some calm, he realized he’d soaked up some light during the fight. He hadn’t even been aware of it. He supposed that like his testing, the fear and anger had dilated his eyes. He’d soaked up luxin without even being conscious of it.

  He had a little red and a little yellow. There were other ships out here, he knew it. He just had to let them know he was here. Someone would save him.

  After taking a deep breath, he shot sparkling yellow out of his finger. Even that small action pushed him under the waves and left him gasping.

  He wondered if there were sharks. He wondered if sharks could smell luxin. He knew they could smell blood, and his father’s blood would be drawing them.

  He didn’t panic, though. He didn’t have anything left in him to panic with. After a minute, he held up his hand and drafted red luxin around his finger. With a few tries, he was able to light it with the yellow.

  But he couldn’t hold it up and hold his father and swim. He tried to light it again after bobbing in the waves a bit, but too much had washed away.

  He heard the ship before he saw it. It came up behind him and blocked out the light behind. A net was thrown over him, and within a minute, he and his father were pulled up, rolled onto the deck.

  “What have we? What have we?” A man started cackling. “Ceres!” he shouted. “Ceres, you fickle wench! You beautiful bitch, Gunner loves you! Thank you! Apology accepted! Boys, gather ’round. See what Captain Gunner’s luck has brought us.”

  Kip was lying on his back, exhausted. All he had strength to do was breathe.

  Gunner? Kip’s thoughts were slow. Gunner was the man on the pirate ship Gavin and Kip and Liv and Ironfist had sunk outside of Garriston, wasn’t he? Gavin had said he hadn’t killed the man because he was an artist. Was this the same man?

  Captain Gunner, a night-black Ilytian bare-chested under a waistcoat—a different waistcoat than last time—rolled Gavin over as far as the protruding blade allowed. It was the same Gunner. Oh hell. “Bugger me,” Gunner said, looking at the blade. He tore it out of Gavin’s body and held it aloft.

  Kip’s blade was not what it had been. His knife was now a longsword. No, more. The wide blade was three and a half feet long, and whiter than ivory, single-edged with twin black whorls crisscrossing up the blade. Bracketed by those black, twisting, living whorls, every one of those seven jewels now burned with inner light, each one its own color from sub-red to superviolet. The spine of the blade was a thin musket, except for the last hand’s breadth, which was pure blade.

  Gunner swung the blade back and forth. “Light,” he said. “Lighter than should be possible.” But when he saw the musket, how the single cutout in the blade was positioned to give space for fingers to steady the barrel, he positively chortled.

  The sound of vomiting made Kip and Gunner both turn from their inspection of the blade. Murmurs shot through the crew as Gavin puked water onto the deck.

  He rolled over, gasping and coughing.

  “Alive? Take him below,” Gunner ordered. “Feed him, tend to his wounds, and bind him. Don’t let him escape. He’s a fighter.” The men lifted Gavin and carried him belowdecks. Captain Gunner shouted again, “Ceres! Ceres! I’m no miser! You share with me, I share with you. I could use this man.” He was talking about Kip, Kip realized. “He’s a drafter. You saw! You know how bad I been wanting a drafter! Good drafter’s hard to find on the sea, Ceres. But you done me right.”

  Oh shit.

  “I do this, we call it straight between us? Fair? You gave me two. I’ll give you one back!” Gunner said. “Boys?”

  Hands descended. Kip tried to fight, but he only got a bloody nose for his trouble. He was so weak there was no resisting. With a heave, the men tossed him back into the sea.

  He surfaced in the darkness, hearing only the sweep of oars and the distant sound of Gunner giving orders and laughing.

  Kip swam, barely having the energy to keep floating on his back, out of light, unable to draft, certain that someone would come.

  No one did.

  Chapter 113

  Koios White Oak the Color Prince came the next morning to the palace in which he’d installed Liv. He seemed jubilant as he beckoned her to join him on the roof.

  Together, they looked out over the city. There were some fires in a few neighborhoods. Fighting still continued in pockets. It would be weeks, probably, until the city was pacified. The Color Prince was offering clemency to those rebels who laid down their arms in the next two days. Those who continued fighting would be subject to retributive rapes, the killing of family members, and all the horrors his men could dream up. He didn’t invent war, he said, and he would do anything to end it quickly. Sharp, quick brutality was better, he said, than tolerating protracted lawlessness.

  “Did it work?” Liv asked.

  “Birthing Atirat?” the prince asked. “Oh yes. You succeeded marvelously. The failure was Atirat’s own—and Zymun’s. We’ll retake the fort on Ruic Head tomorrow and perhaps we’ll learn what happened. It seems he did capture it, but he must have botched something, because they knew he had it. And then he lost it. If he lives, I don’t expect he’ll come back to camp. You’re free of him.”

  That was a relief, though Liv felt weak for feeling it. She’d turned the tide of a battle, and she was afraid of a sniveling teenaged boy?

  “There’s more good news,” the prince said. “Aside from your tremendous success and us taking the city. Your father wasn’t fighting for them.”

  “I know,” Liv said.

  “Has he been in communication with you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?” Koios White Oak asked.

  “Because we won.”

  The prince laughed, but Liv could tell her answer peeved him. “Let us hope we never have to test your confidence in his abilities, then. But there’s more. Can you feel it?”

  He meant magically. “No. I don’t have your senses,” Liv said.

  “The Prism is dead. The colors are free.”

  “I don’t understand,” Liv said. She felt sick. Her senses had been shut off as soon as Atirat had taken shape. She’d missed the climax of the battle, and she’d hoped that somehow she’d been wrong, that Kip and Karris and Gavin had lived.

  “This…” Koios swept a hand toward the bay. “This was a setback. The bane rise spontaneously, Aliviana. All we need to do is wait, and there will be another. Another blue, another green, another one of every color, now.”

  She looked over at him sharply. No wonder he wasn’t very upset.

  “It will take time, but they can’t stop us now, Liv. The only trick for us is to make sure that as each bane rises, a drafter we trust is at the center of it.”

  “A drafter we trust? You mean that any drafter can…” She’d seen Atirat atop the bane, of course, but—Dervani Malargos?

  “Any sufficiently talented drafter, yes. In centuries past, it led to bloodbaths, as every green would tear every other apart, each in their quest to become a god. And then the gods would w
ar with each other. But that time is past.” He smiled magnanimously. He opened a hand, and there was a choker in it with an odd, throbbing black jewel at the center. “I told you that I had a purpose in mind for you, Aliviana, a great purpose befitting the greatest of my superviolets. So tell me, can you now guess what it is?”

  Chapter 114

  Andross Guile stood in his cabin, examining himself. He stood, shirtless, with no hood, no cowl, no dark spectacles, the curtains open. He looked at his hands, his arms, and then, last, he looked at his eyes. The broken red halo he’d been hiding for months was gone. He still had all his colors—sub-red, red, orange, and yellow—entwined halfway through the irises of his shocking blue eyes, but they were in balance now.

  He’d seen the Blinder’s Knife work before—and it didn’t work like this. That knife killed. But when he looked at his shoulder, it was flawless, not even the skin broken. He looked at his eyes again, certain it was some trick. But there the halo was, stable. And he felt hale. He felt better than he’d felt in fifteen years, twenty. He’d had to sink into his own discipline in order to keep the red from driving him mad—and at the end there, he wasn’t sure he was winning.

  Now he was simply a drafter again. A polychrome with a good ten years left in his eyes.

  This, this changed everything.

  Sometime not long before dawn, Kip washed ashore. He couldn’t take credit for swimming in. He’d barely had the strength to float and breathe for the last few hours. He crawled far enough up the sand not to get pulled out to sea and collapsed like a beached whale.

  He woke to someone picking at his pockets, around noon. He floundered, slapping their hands away, afraid he was under attack. He sat up, and saw that there were at least a dozen bodies washed up on the beach around him.

  The looter started laughing. Kip blinked up at him, but the young man had the blinding noonday sun burning over his shoulder. He was dressed in a dirty white tunic and cloak adorned with many bands of color. He also had a pistol dangling from his hand.

  “Oho, I stopped at the right beach, didn’t I?” the young man said. “Lucky, aren’t I?”

  Kip looked down the beach and saw the young man’s dinghy on the beach. He must have seen all the dead from the water and decided to loot what he could. Kip was thirsty. “You have any water?” he croaked.

  “In the boat. Food, too.”

  Kip stood with difficulty. The young man didn’t help him up. Then it hit him. He knew that voice. He squinted against the brightness. “Oh no,” he said.

  “Bit slow, aren’t ya?” Zymun said. He stepped forward and punched Kip in the face.

  Kip fell and sat heavily in the sand. He checked his nose, eyes streaming. On the bright side, it wasn’t broken. He stood slowly, walked over to the dinghy. He halfway emptied the skin. He had a headache that he thought was a hangover. He hadn’t had one of those before. Plus he was lightsick. Every part of his body hurt. He had a gash along his ribs and his left arm was throbbing from being stabbed.

  Kip considered attacking Zymun, who was rubbing his hand: punching Kip had hurt his fist. But Zymun had a gun. He would see if Kip tried to draft—which right now sounded as appetizing as gargling sewage—and Kip was feeling about as agile as a hundred-and-twelve-year-old man. Kip had seen the boy draft, long ago. He had no doubt that Zymun had the will to use that pistol. He got in the boat.

  “Take off that belt and give it to me. Then tear off a strip of your shirt and tie it around your eyes,” Zymun said. “Slowly.”

  Kip did both. He felt Zymun push the dinghy into the water. Kip lunged forward, tearing off his blindfold.

  Zymun was clinging to the prow with one hand, bobbing in the water, halfway to climbing into the boat, and he had the pistol leveled at Kip’s face. “Back. Back!” he said. “I can’t hold on here for long, so if you’re not seated and blindfolded in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your face.”

  Settling back onto his bench, Kip pulled the blindfold back up, defeated. He’d almost done it. Almost. The cloak of failure draped easily around his slumped shoulders. Kip Almost. Again.

  No. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t that Kip anymore. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t rejected.

  He had gotten into the Blackguard. He had been accepted by the best drafters and fighters in the world. He had been accepted by his father. He had fought a king and wights and a god. He’d made huge mistakes: he’d been stupid and weak and cowardly and rejected. Without him, his father wouldn’t have been stabbed. But he also had pulled his father from the waves, had saved his life when no one else could. Kip had donned Almost as his spectacles. There was a middle path, a golden mean between the whore’s son and the Prism’s. He wasn’t really Kip Godslayer, but he also wasn’t the boy who’d knuckled under to Ramir. Not anymore. I am what I do, and I am Breaker.

  He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness. He who has ears, let him hear.

  It’s time for me to break that old lens.

  “Take the oars,” Zymun said. As Kip reached blindly for them, he heard Zymun slip into the boat. Then he felt luxin encase his hands, locking them around the oars. “You row for an hour, and then I’ll give you food and more water. Go on! We got a long way to go, brother.”

  Kip started rowing. His left arm did not appreciate it. “Brother?” he asked. His voice came out calm, unafraid, unashamed.

  “My grandfather Andross Guile’s summoned me to the Chromeria. He said the rest of his family hadn’t turned out. Said he’s considering adopting me. Said he has big plans.” He paused. “What, didn’t you know? I’m Karris and Gavin’s son. I’m Zymun White Oak.”

  Kip’s heart dropped out of his chest, punched a hole in the deck, and killed a dozen fish on its way to the sea floor.

  He heard a metallic scrape of the pistol being examined, and he thought that maybe Zymun had decided to kill him after all. Then Zymun barked a laugh. “Holy fuck am I lucky,” he said to himself. “Would you look at that? This gun wasn’t even loaded.”

  Chapter 115

  Gavin woke to someone slapping his face. He felt awful. The cabin was dark and stank of men who hadn’t washed in ages and bilgewater and seaweed and fish and human waste. There were manacles on his wrists, and he was naked except for a breechclout.

  Another slap cracked across his cheek, hard enough to put the taste of blood in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He looked at the man in front of him. His lungs and throat felt raw from the seawater he’d tried to breathe.

  “Gunner, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. His voice was raw, too. Last night was a dim memory. “What are you doing?”

  “Can’t draft, can ya?”

  Gavin held up his hands, empty, helpless. It was so dim in the cabin it would take him a couple of minutes to draft enough to be a threat to anyone. And summoning the will would be a problem, too, with how terrible he felt.

  “Give me a couple minutes,” he said. His left eye was swollen. There was—Oh, Orholam! Gavin checked his chest. It was uninjured. What the hell kind of nightmares had he been having? Thinking he’d been stabbed? Had he been drugged and smuggled off the flagship?

  “Your eyes are as blue as Ceres’s, Lord Guile. Not a touch of halo in ’em. Always hated luxlords putting on airs. Ordering people around. Not willing to pull their own weight.” He laughed low, as if he’d said something clever. “But I gots my own solution to the little injustices life brings under my purview. It ain’t quite the ship of state, but she is a stately ship, is she no?”

  “This your boat?” Gavin asked, still disoriented. He was seated on a bench next to a skinny man with white hair and beard, big eyes, half clothed. All of the men down here were skinny and half clothed, all drinking water or tearing into hardtack. All wearing chains. All watching him.

  “Yes, my boat. The Bitter Cob, I call her, for how she’ll leave your nethers raw. She belongs to me, and now you belongs to her. Serve well, Guile. For if this old girl goes down, you
go down with her.”

  The other end of his manacles snapped shut around the oar.

  “Gunner…” Gavin said, warning.

  “Captain Gunner, Number Six. Or you get a whipping.”

  “Orholam damn you, don’t you know who I am?!” It had been almost two decades since Gunner had worked for Gavin. Maybe time had changed him too much for the man to recognize him without his rich clothes.

  Gunner grinned. “He who asks, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ is the one who doesn’t know the answer. But here’s the thing, Gavin Guile. I’m going to give you the opportunity to find out.”

  “Not Gavin,” Gavin said defiantly. “Dazen. My name is Dazen Guile.”

  Gunner threw open the door and daylight poured in. “Whatever guile you use makes no matter to me. You’re Galley Slave Six. Third row, middle seat. But don’t worry, you row strongly and obey alacritously, and you’ll get a head seat in six months. Good to have goals, ain’t it?” He grinned toothily. “Boys?”

  Gavin said nothing. He didn’t resist, for in the open door he’d seen something worse than bondage. In the dim near-night of the reeking cabin, he hadn’t noticed: colors were always muted by darkness. But with the opening of that door, with the sky and the birds and sails, and the pure puissant light that Gavin had been waiting to soak up to use to break these chains and escape, he saw something worse. He couldn’t split the colors from that pure white light. He couldn’t split the colors because he couldn’t draft the colors. He couldn’t draft the colors because he couldn’t see the colors. The ignorant speak of subchromacy as color-blindness, when it really is only color confusion.

  But Gavin was color-blind. All the world was gray. It was as Gunner had tried to tell him. In one instant, everything that was special about Gavin Guile had been stripped away. He not only wasn’t the Prism anymore, he wasn’t even a drafter. The door to the deck slapped closed, and chains rattled through the handles, trapping Gavin in a blacker darkness than any he had ever known.