by Brent Weeks
It would have worked if he hadn’t been holding the longbow in one hand. Instead, it impeded the luxin thrust and threw him off balance even as he was flying through the air. But Kip was running right under that gap, and he threw up a wide hand of green luxin that bobbed Winsen gently back up into the air. Instead of smashing into the side of the building, Winsen landed sideways just at the top of it. He rolled across the roof and smacked his head on the dome, but was unhurt.
They were almost to the great fish market near the docks when lightning struck again, blinding Teia. The boom of thunder literally threw her from her feet. She tumbled as she’d been taught, throwing one hand down hard so that her head didn’t take the impact.
She regained her senses in time to see that one of the Thousand Stars had been struck by lightning. They were supposed to be insulated with the copper lightning-catchers, but either it was gone or hadn’t worked. The entire stiltlike Star was leaning, shattering, stones raining down. Then the arch collapsed all at once, coming down in roar of stone and dust in the heavy rain.
The placement couldn’t have been worse—right in front of them, and between them and Buskin. As if the gods themselves had intervened to save him. On the other hand, the arch had hit the edge of the building on which Cruxer and Winsen stood. If Cruxer hadn’t stopped to help Winsen, he would have been crushed by the falling rock.
Teia stopped behind the rubble. She could climb over it, but every stone was shifting. Too much delay. Oh, hells. Kip!
Kip had been ahead of all of them.
Teia looked for him. He was nowhere in the fish market beyond the rubble.
Oh, no. No no no.
Her heart stopped. The air of the intersection was awash in a cloud of dust, only slowly being beaten down by the downpour. People were screaming, horses were whinnying in terror, but Teia had no mind for any of it. She drafted a paryl torch, the beams of its light cutting through the dust cloud. She charged forward, barely pausing long enough to pull a cloth in front of her face so she could breathe. The ground was littered with broken masonry, shattered mirror-glass, and there—dear Orholam, a body. Was it—
Teia grabbed the hand she could see and pulled. It came out, with half an arm. She held the arm in both hands, part horrified beyond words, part cold and analytical. This arm seemed skinnier than Kip’s. The skin was… covered in grime, colorless in her paryl vision. She went back to the visible spectrum, but it was too dusty. She couldn’t see anything. She turned the arm over, went back to paryl.
No drafter’s scars on the hands or wrists.
It wasn’t Kip. It was a star tower slave. What were they doing up there in a storm?
She tossed the arm aside. She didn’t care about some slave.
A part of her wrote down that thought in stone. It would come back to haunt her. But right now, she didn’t care. Kip. Dear Orholam, where’s Kip?
She picked her way over the rubble, looking in paryl through the dust.
The rubble ahead of her shifted and sank. Suddenly, she heard coughing. With quick, light steps, she crossed the rubble. There was Kip, upside down. He’d drafted an egg of luxin around himself as the arch fell all around him, but had quickly run out of air and let the egg collapse.
Teia grabbed his hand and pulled him up and out. He was besmirched, the heavy rain turning the dust coating his features into mud in instants.
For a split second, he’d looked so terrified coming out of that little space that Teia couldn’t reconcile the little-boy terror on his face with the kind of drafting she’d just seen out of him. He stared at her, frantic, frightened, chest heaving, coughing still.
She tried to hand him a cloth to breathe through, but he swept her up into a bear hug.
For one moment, she was utterly stunned. Then, in the next, a sudden thawing. She hadn’t been really touched in so long, she couldn’t even remember the last time. Kip’s pure, delighted-to-see-you, I-care-so-much-for-you touch? Oh, dear gods. There was something about the pure physicality of it: an acceptance beyond words, a joy that spoke only truth. But she was frozen, too surprised by the sudden emergence of Kip from death, by the flood of emotion. She didn’t hug back, even as the complete, total, abject need to hug back rose in her. She wanted to cling to someone—no, not to someone; it wasn’t just a need to connect, though it was that, too—to connect with Kip, her friend.
Her best friend. The one who saw her.
The tides rising in her were obliterating, scouring away the dross of every preconception and prejudice.
And Kip dropped the hug, suddenly awkward at her failure to hug back.
No! her mind cried, but her arms—her treacherous arms—didn’t rise.
“Sorry. Thanks,” Kip said quickly, as if to cover, as if to ignore, as if he didn’t feel rejected.
No, Orholam no, I didn’t mean it like that.
But Teia said nothing, didn’t move.
Kip turned. They were on the very edge of the rubble—they’d come through it, together. But they were too late. Kip pulled his blue spectacles on. They were miraculously unbroken, and he drafted quickly, again as if it were nothing. In a few moments, there were stairs from where they stood up to the edge of the building where Cruxer and Winsen still stood.
They joined the young men there. They hadn’t given up the hunt. They stood ready as hounds at the leash. Cruxer pointed. “There!”
Buskin was almost through the crowded, emptying fish market. People were running everywhere, still packing up their stalls, trying not to lose all of the day’s catch and sales. Winsen was standing with an arrow nocked, though he hadn’t drawn it—there was no shot yet, and holding a longbow drawn for any length of time was impossible.
Buskin reached the far side of the market. He turned and grinned fiercely at them. He put his fingers under his chin and flicked them forward in rude salute. Then he turned his back and walked away.
Winsen pulled the arrow back into the big longbow, using the thick muscles of his back to help with the massive draw-weight, even as people ran to and fro, obscuring Buskin. The shot was at least two hundred paces. A young mother tried to pull three children out of the street, but found herself with too few hands, juggling tools in one hand and recalcitrant kids in the other, at least one crying.
“Winsen,” Cruxer said sadly, “it’s too far. You can’t—”
Winsen loosed the arrow.
Teia put a hand to her mouth, certain she was going to see a child die. The arrow flew too fast for eyes to follow. She and Kip and Cruxer and Winsen, too, all looked to Buskin. He reached the corner and looked back—and suddenly hurtled to the ground sideways as the arrow ripped through his chest, lodged in whatever mail he was wearing, and flung him down.
It took them several minutes to cross the empty market and get to him. He was dead. No one lingered in the market or the streets. No one wanted to involve themselves in whatever private quarrel this was. Not today, not in the storm and the rain and the lightning that might slay good or bad.
Winsen finally unstrung his great yew bow when he saw that Buskin was dead. He didn’t seem moved in the least, other than being satisfied. Cruxer looked at him, disbelieving, and not just of the accuracy of his shot.
“What the hell, Winsen?” Kip asked. “There were nearly a hundred people here. How’d you even make that shot, with that many innocents in the way?”
Winsen looked at Cruxer, then at Teia, and finally at Kip. Teia had killed before, and it had left her shaken and weepy. She’d been stunned at first, sure, not able to understand or process what had happened exactly. The finality of it had sunk in immediately, so she was slow to judge those who seemed cold when they killed. It wasn’t the same for everyone. But Winsen’s eyes didn’t have that numb look in them that said he hadn’t processed the killing yet, that he was stunned. His eyes were clear. Buskin had been a bad man. He needed to be killed. Winsen had done it. What more was there to say or think about?
Winsen shrugged, puzzled. “I didn’t care if I m
issed.”
Chapter 66
“Why am I reporting to you rather than Commander Ironfist?” Kip asked Karris. He stood in the Prism’s quarters in the Blackguard’s informal posture, back straight, legs shoulder width apart, hands lightly clasped behind his back. Dressed in his inductee’s grays—which were loose and shapeless, standard-issue baggy rather than the tailored, formfitting luxin-infused clothing full Blackguards earned upon taking final vows—he looked martial. Karris noted the change.
Kip’s eyes were no longer simply the striking blue he’d been born with. Green ringed each pupil, many tiny flecks of blue served to subtly brighten his irises, red bloomed like stars or fires, and a close inspection revealed hints of every other color there, too. She would have reprimanded him for burning through his life so quickly if it weren’t so hypocritical. He was still stout, maybe always would be, but the baby fat was almost gone from his face, and when he stood here with determination and mild pique at doing something that didn’t make sense to him, he hearkened back unmistakably to a young Gavin Guile.
Moreover, his question was a good one, and it deserved better than the lie Karris had prepared. “Commander Ironfist is a bit busy these days. I’ll debrief you and pass on the relevant details to the commander and the White. Though I no longer serve in an official capacity, it is war, and we all serve where we’re needed.”
Kip looked stung. “Not even this is important enough for a direct report? The betrayal of two Blackguards, and their deaths?”
“We’re in a civil war. Betrayal is commonplace. Do you know how many Blackguards we’ve lost in the sweeps this month?”
“Six,” Kip said.
She stopped. “That’s right.” Kip seemed oblivious at times, as caught up in his own world as sixteen-year-olds get. But maybe he was more aware than she’d credited.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
And he did. It wasn’t as good of a report as she’d expect from a full Blackguard, but for one unpracticed and ignorant of the expectations for such a report, it was excellent.
“Again,” she said.
He told it again, this time clearer, with fewer oh-I-forgot-to-say’s. But then he stopped and rubbed his forehead. “I wasn’t going to… It doesn’t help anyone, but…”
“I expect your reports to be fully honest, Breaker,” she said.
“I didn’t understand it at the time, and then things happened so fast it kind of got buried, but right before the first arrow took out Lytos, I heard him say, ‘Fuck it, I can’t do this.’ ”
A chill invaded Karris’s bones. “And you took that to mean what?”
“I didn’t take it to mean anything. All hell broke loose right then, but looking back, I think he had second thoughts right at the end. I think he was drawing his knife to attack Buskin, not me.”
Lytos. Orholam have mercy. Karris had been holding off her own memories of the big eunuch. He’d been a practical joker with an infectious laugh, constantly short-sheeting the newly sworn Blackguards, putting fire balm in their underclothes, dropping live scorpions in young Blackguards’ boots (though he sealed the scorpions’ stingers in solid luxin first—he wasn’t malicious, just a prankster).
That Lytos might come through and do the right thing at the last second broke her heart for some reason even more than the abstract thought that he might have been deceived or blackmailed into betraying them.
And then to be killed before he could prove his fidelity. Oh, Lytos.
No wonder Kip hadn’t told his friends: By the way, one of the men you killed? He was on our side.
“As he lay there, he said something about a luxiat,” Kip said. “But it wasn’t clear. He died before he could tell me.”
His voice was level as he said it, but something in his tone reminded her suddenly that as much as this boy looked like a soldier, stood like a soldier, reported like a soldier, he was also still a boy. “I’m sorry, Kip,” she said.
“Am I right, not to tell them, I mean?” Kip asked brusquely. He didn’t want her softness and understanding now. “The commander says we’re not afraid of the truth, that that’s what makes Blackguards different. Am I serving my team by holding this back, or betraying them by not trusting them to handle it?”
“Who took the shot that killed Lytos?” she asked. She knew from his report.
“Winsen,” Kip said, puzzled.
“Then what do you think?” she asked.
His brow furrowed. “Winsen’s… different. It doesn’t seem to bother him, killing, I mean.”
“There are some few like that,” she said. “I think if you told Winsen that he would say Lytos shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That Lytos put himself in the line of fire, that he gave your team no choice. I think Lytos would agree, don’t you?”
“It’s just that simple for some people?” Kip asked.
“Some people are what they appear.”
“Not enough,” he said. He looked angry—at her. Just the misplaced emotions of youth, or something more particular? Then Kip said, “When did you know you loved my father?”
It was someone tearing the bandages off a wound. “Pardon?” she asked.
He didn’t repeat the question.
“That is a very personal question,” she said.
“Not really,” he said.
Part of her wanted to slap him for countering her so insolently, but in the next moment she knew that it was really that she wanted to slap Dazen for keeping so many secrets. Now to keep the secrets of that man who might well be dead, she was going to have to lie, too. “There was a dance. The Luxlords’ Ball. I danced with both him and his brother. I think I fell in love with him then.”
“So you always loved Gavin?” Kip asked.
She saw the trap just in time. “This, this conversation is finished,” she sputtered.
“But you tried to elope with Dazen. Why would you do that if you loved Gavin all along? Dazen was the younger brother. There was no advantage in marrying him. There was no reason to elope with him except for love.”
“I was young!”
“I’m young. I don’t destroy the world over it.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Karris said.
“Because I only get lies and evasions every time I ask.”
It took the wind from her sails, though anything but becalmed. He was right. He deserved the truth, and he couldn’t be told the truth. He thought his father was his uncle, and his uncle his father, and he hated the one and loved the other, in the wrong order.
“Kip,” she said quietly. “How many times have you told the story of what happened to you at the Battle of Ru?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He said nothing for a moment, then gave in. “Once or twice, when I was with the squad. We’d been drinking. Even in my squad, some of them were so… so excited to hear about it. It seems… obscene somehow.”
“I was there with you, Kip, and you did nothing wrong. In fact, you were the hero that day.”
The word dropped between them like an ill-fitting garment. Kip couldn’t pick it up.
“We all acted bravely, Kip. We all did what we had to, but your actions made all the difference. And you’re reluctant to recount them, because anyone who wasn’t there can’t really understand the terror of that island coming alive and trying to devour us, of those men and women remade into giants, and of that feeling of seeing the Prism himself helpless. Our Prism, who can do everything, for whom all things are easy as breathing, and there he was, helpless. You acted like a hero would act, and you got lucky and it mattered. But you know, as warriors know, how easily you could have been unlucky, how others just as brave and braver still did more and greater things, but because they failed or were simply unseen, will never be known.”
Kip swallowed, said nothing. “Baya Niel must have talked. I heard about it in a song. In a song! They took some old drinking song and put my name in it! I almost thre
w up.”
“It wasn’t Baya Niel,” Karris said.
“What?”
“It was me. I talked to some of the most popular minstrels in the Jaspers.”
Kip’s face twisted like she’d betrayed him. “But you… you understand. How could you?”
“Because it’s true, Kip. It’s not all the truth, and what’s true about it may be misunderstood, but that others will misunderstand doesn’t mean we keep the truth in a basket. And because the day may come when you need a Name.”
“I don’t want another name,” he said, glum teenager again. “I’ve already got too many.”
“Not a name like Kip, a Name, like Breaker. As in, ‘I am become a Name.’ ” If he didn’t know the Gevison, he should.
“I don’t want that either,” he said.
“I wasn’t done. You can barely tell a story about a battle in which everyone came out looking good. You didn’t fail. You didn’t fire a musket as a friend moved into the line of fire and got his face blown off. You weren’t a coward that day. We fought odds beyond human comprehension, and if it wasn’t a victory for us, at least it wasn’t a victory for our foes.”
Her lips were suddenly dry, for here she must tell him truths and lies linked, and he would never forgive her for it. “There were no battles that simple in the False Prism’s War. None. How can you tell stories of what you did when it seems everything you did was wrong? When you were a coward and your friends died because of it? Or is it less painful to tell of when you almost died because your own kin failed you, running away when they could have saved you easily? A man who’s a hero one day can be a coward the next, and sometimes even telling of our heroism reminds us of our cowardice.
“My brother and sister Blackguards fought and killed cousins they’d met a hundred times. Classmates with whom we’d played pranks on our magisters. Lovers with whom we’d shared a first kiss. Samite had an unrequited love for this ridiculously handsome cavalier. His family joined the other side. Samite was part of a strike force that infiltrated a city, found the cavalier with his fellows and their families camped in one of the great stables of the city. They barred the doors and set it afire. She listened to him burn to death, screaming to her to have mercy, not for himself but for his family who were inside with him. Samite loved horses. Riding was her one refuge from her cares. She won’t ride now unless she must. She doesn’t feel worthy after burning two hundred and seventy of the innocent creatures to death—and all those people. She was sixteen years old.”
