by Brent Weeks
Shhhhhh, the wind blew through the branches. Shhh.
He sucked in blue light, the blue blood of creation. Light is life. He sipped blue until it filled him, until he was only thought.
His racing heart slowed. He closed his eyes and let the blue course through him. It filled him with awareness. Thirty-one pairs of jaws, attached at the front and back of the leeches’ bloated bodies to his skin. Four singles who’d had one half or the other knocked free of Kip’s skin by his movement. With the blue in him, Kip remembered some long-forgotten advice on how to remove leeches. Not with fire or alcohol or the juice of lemons, else they’d retract angrily, vomiting foulness back into their bites as they recoiled. Instead, a fingernail to break the seal of their mouth on your skin, front and back. A fingernail and patience.
Kip’s gorge rose once more, but he stared at the sky again until his mind was a placid, still pond. He couldn’t bear it. Not sixty-some times. He lost the blue completely and was almost a beast again, trapped, trapped in his skin with leeches like he was trapped in a closet full of rats—
Like this.
Calm. Gentle. He took in blue, and more blue. He barely had the will to open himself, barely understood what the swirling color was doing almost of its own accord. It filled his body, found every tooth, every Y-shaped incision.
Gather your will.
He had no will. He reached toward sub-red for passion, toward green for wildness.
No, your will. Luxin is your tool; you are not its tool. Stand.
Kip still hadn’t gathered any will, but he stood, feeling persecuted. He knew what to do, but knowing what to do here was like knowing that all you had to do to climb a mountain is to walk. Orholam give me strength.
He already has. Use it.
Arms and legs outstretched, Kip clenched his fists, bowed his head. The power didn’t course through him in a scream of rage and omnipotence, but instead in drops of silent tears. It followed his blood, finding tiny mouths, shutting them, rejecting them, sealing the poisoned blood away from him, and forcing it out, too.
One by one, the leeches dropped off. Dropped off his arms. Dropped off his legs. Dropped off his chest. Dropped off his back. Dropped off his butt. Dear Orholam—dropped off his groin. Dropped off his face.
Kip was streaming blood from sixty-two tiny wounds. The leeches’ poison made blood run free. Kip wondered how much blood he’d lost. Several of the leeches nuzzled his feet, looking for a new spot to feed. He stepped away. He had no revulsion left. There were only problems, and fixing them.
Oh, simple. He drafted blue caps over every cut. As soon as he took a step, he dislodged a quarter of the blue caps. Of course. Blue was too stiff; if he moved, he would lose his bandages.
He leaned against a tree, sat, drafted a blue cocoon around himself, sealed it, sealed his wounds, and slept.
He woke twice to vomit, wasn’t sure if he remembered to draft his bandages or his cage anew.
He dreamt or he had visions or he did things barely aware. A quietly weeping woman, in the gray morning light, hair in a great kinky halo. “Why are you crying?” Kip heard the voice asking, only realized it was his own after the words were out.
“I weep because you suffer, and only the second sons of Am are entitled to feel pity without passion. And even then, not in life.” She stood and her aspect changed suddenly, flickering between this dignified woman and something entirely other. “Sleep,” she said, quietly radiant. “You won’t die on my watch.”
All faded into fever and nightmares and sweat and shivering cold and thunder and cool water. He heard the sounds of birds screeching, monkeys howling, something like a dog barking at him, but all of it fast, too fast, skipping along the surface of time as if he were in his father’s skimmer, light flashing across his face and disappearing like it was happening in seconds, when he knew it must be days. He had some recollection of holding a broad leaf to his face, funneling water to his lips as a mighty downpour shook heaven and earth.
When he woke again, he was himself.
He felt clear, but weak. He dissolved his blue cocoon, and almost vomited again from the touch of luxin, lightsick. There were paw prints in the mud around his cocoon, big ones, not wolves, though, he knew wolf prints from growing up in Tyrea. There were no human prints, though, not even his own. The woman had been a hallucination, a fever dream.
How much had been dream or delusion? He took a deep breath, checking himself, checking his surroundings. No leeches, no frogs, no storms. Not now anyway.
Kip stood on wobbly legs. He couldn’t tell how long he’d been here. The only indication of passing time was his cuts, scabbed over. So the leeches had been real. He examined the cuts. Leech bites usually heal more slowly than most wounds, but with the blue luxin helping, Kip guessed he’d been in his barely conscious state for less than a week.
The hunger had lost its urgency. Kip felt an odd purity, the serenity of saints and ascetics and the batshit insane. The clarity of a soul detaching itself from its flesh home, perhaps. He walked for an hour before he realized he was naked. His first thought when he became aware of it wasn’t embarrassment; it was protection. His skin was a poor barrier for the rigors of jungle travel.
He began drafting while he walked. He tried green first. It was so abundant, it was the most obvious choice. But he gave it up soon. Too heavy, too coarse to wear against his skin. When he came across a clump of trumpet-shaped dazzlingly yellow flowers, he stopped. He tried to weave cloth of yellow, but he always lost that perfect, fine mesh point where yellow would hold its solidity before he could get a sizable chunk. The smaller the amount of yellow he tried to make solid, the easier it was.
The declining sun lit up a spiderweb, and Kip was mesmerized by the beauty of it. A tiny moth flew into the web and stuck. The spider moved in to make its kill, but Kip was entranced by the web itself. He extended superviolet luxin toward the web—finer fingers than his fingers could ever be. The anchor lines were like steel cables, but the trap lines had little dots of goo in which more line was spooled. Sticky there, but it also kept the line initially tight, while keeping slack so that the webs didn’t snap when fought directly, they would yield and pull and entangle.
Superviolet. Superviolet was the answer. Not to that, but—
It felt like the pieces to the problem were swirling around his head, just out of reach. The sun sank, leaving Kip cold. He hadn’t even drafted his shelter. He sat in a torpor all night. When the sun rose again, he had it.
He wove superviolet into tiny links, like a single chain, though instead of pounding each link shut like armorers did, he could simply draft them into perfect loops one after the other, thereby depriving the chain of any weak areas. Then he flooded that form with yellow luxin, his will having to touch each tiny link to seal it. It took half an hour. No problem.
The second chain was much harder; he had to thread each loop through two other loops of the first chain. In an hour, he had two connected strands of yellow luxin chain-mail cloth. Two connected, impossibly short strands of yellow luxin. He almost gave up then. Instead, he sat, staring. Barely even thinking. The water of a stream rushed past on its way to the sea, and Kip watched. Open luxin still streaming in his fingertips, he touched the water like it was open luxin flowing past, the blood of the earth.
For a moment, he felt Orholam himself, the creator larger than this earth, this creation, but acting through it, like all the universe was luxin held open in His hands. A flash, blindingly bright white light, the sensation of life, light, as Kip was pulled through the water to the sea to every water that touched the sea, flashing out to a thousand veins, river-arteries aglow with power. Everywhere, all at once, not just a tracery of lines on a map, but with depth. Water following the sun’s call and breaking into mist, rising, becoming clouds. Water, lying on the deeps, its belly scratching sunken cities. Whales and sea demons barely large enough to touch his consciousness, giants like minnows darting everywhere, life too small for a human eye, basking in O
rholam’s light, their mindless life itself singing his praise by being.
Kip lost consciousness.
When he woke, the strand of cloth was in his lap, twenty links wide. He straightened his legs, worked the cramps out of them from his cross-legged pose. He stared at the strands as if they were mocking him. He hadn’t drafted those extra strands, had he? He’d not been himself, but he thought he remembered all that he had done.
Kip stared at the water, and touched it again, his will open. But now it was only water. “I want to save my father,” he whispered.
Silence.
“I’d pay anything,” he said.
But light abides not a lie. He heard nothing.
There was a part of Kip that had felt destined for greatness from the time he was young. Maybe everyone felt that way. It hadn’t mattered how he looked on the outside, that his mother was mindless in addiction, that he was fat and ugly. No matter how much he despised himself, some part of him thought that someday, someday he would shake the pillars of the earth. That something amazing inside him would be let out. That he had a destiny.
Every stone they’d cast at him, he’d accepted, and he’d used them to construct a little altar to himself. Andross Guile laughing, telling him about the Lightbringer. ‘The old word that says he’ll be a ‘great’ man from his youth could be a pun in the original Parian—another meaning of the word ‘great’ is ‘rotund.’ Which … well.’
He’s supposed to kill gods and kings.
I’ve done that.
He’s supposed to be a genius of magic.
What if I am that?
Gavin had said, ‘Don’t ruin yourself on this foolishness, boy, there is no Lightbringer.’
And yet Kip believed. He wanted to believe. Needed to.
‘I keep trying to draw you as the next Prism, and I can’t,’ the Mirror Janus Borig had told him. And then as she died, she’d said, ‘I know who the Lightbringer is now.’
She meant me. She had to mean me.
But there was only silence.
Kip stood. He followed the stream to the shore, turned north. At sunset, he found a lone farmhouse. An older woman in a simple farmer’s dress was standing outside, singing a song to the setting sun in a language Kip didn’t recognize. She saw him from afar, smiled, and beckoned him to come with one hand as she continued singing. The sound was like the rivers and the winds and the deeps of the sea, and the warmth and light of a fire against a child’s fears of the darkness. It held the promise of the morning and the comfort of a mother’s heartbeat.
For Kip, who hadn’t heard a word spoken in days, the euphonious rise and fall of foreign syllables unencumbered with translation were a perfect, gentle transition from the raw terrors of the jungle into the sparse, hard-earned comforts of this frontier farm.
“So you’re it,” she said, voice low and calm, moving slowly as if he were a wild animal, speaking softly as her song faded, settling into Kip’s heart. She smiled. “Was thinking I heard wrong. ‘Clad in light’?” she asked, addressing the sky. She laughed heartily and that perfectly human sound made Kip wake as if from a dream.
But not all at once.
He realized he was still naked. He draped the cloth in front of him, but without urgency, without embarrassment. He had a thought and knew it was strange at the same time: the locals have a custom, this clothing custom, though here there are no thorns to snatch and tear your skin; I should go along.
The locals? You mean humans, Kip?
Ah, there he was. He himself, Kip the Lip. Some part of him was glad that that Kip wasn’t gone for good.
She studied his eyes, seeing him come to himself, and her leathery, freckled skin wrinkled merrily. “He told me to expect something today. Been on tenterhooks through all my washing and weaving. Had that little phrase, ‘clad in light,’ pop in my head.” She shook her head. “Convinced myself it was ‘lightly clad.’ Well, you are that, aren’t you? Good thing the Good One sent you now, young sir. I fainted the first time I saw my husband naked. No wyrthig, swear. Took the shine right off the rose for him, I tell you, and I didn’t do much better for years. The Lord of Light loves to give me a gentle elbow about all that from time to time. But come. Let’s take care of you.”
And so she did. She took Kip in, fed him from the soup she’d already had on, though she only gave him the broth, then she bathed him, tended his wounds, and put him to bed. When he woke, two days later, she fed him again. Coreen was a widow, but several of her sons and daughters lived within easy walking distance and one at least visited each day, so when Kip told her he needed to go to the Chromeria, she found out that a trader was due to leave in two days and would make room for Kip—for free. Kip spent one more day abed, and then was up.
They developed an easy rapport, joking and teasing as if they’d known each other for years. She reminded him of Sanson’s mother back in Rekton. The woman had always made extra cakes or sweetmeats or pastries, and they’d played an informal game of Kip trying to steal one or two without her noticing. He almost never got away clean, and when he did, she’d ask him some question that he would try to answer around a mouthful of whatever.
She took care of me, knowing my mother wasn’t doing so, and she did it in a way that never made me ashamed. She made it a game, for me. Kip had seen the fun in it before, but he’d never seen the kindness of it until now.
And she’s dead. Like all of them.
Maybe Coreen’s jokes and laughter were a kindness, too. She’d seen that Kip was barely sane; she’d heard him wake sweating and screaming from another of the dreams, and she treated him like a mother would treat an incorrigible friend of her son. Kip found out that her late husband had been a renowned veteran of the Prisms’ War, though she never said on which side and Kip didn’t ask, and that made more sense of it. She had some of a warrior’s sense of humor: black and light, irreverent to death as death was irreverent to all else.
But she had a warmth, too, that was hugely appealing, and part of Kip wanted to stay here forever.
On his last full day, dressed in the widow’s husband’s clothes, which fit well due to Coreen’s labors with a needle and thread, Kip fixed what he could around her cabin. He drafted a few yellow lux torches, made some fire rocks to help start a blaze easily, tried his hand at drafting green to fertilize the vegetable gardens of her two daughters, and fixed a broken axle on a haycart by sheathing it in solid yellow luxin—something useful he’d actually learned during his lectures. Imagine that.
The morning he left, Coreen said, “I can’t let you go without saying my piece. Have I earned that?”
“Of course.”
She took a deep breath. “Kip, the Lord doesn’t want you to think you’re worthless, but he may want you to think you’re worth less than you presently think. He wants your eyes to be whole, so you have an accurate view of you. It’s done in love, you understand? When you surrender what isn’t under your control, you’re not giving up a crown, you’re giving up a yoke. I told you about my prudery in my youth. I was a beautiful girl, and though I never would have said it, I thought I was more virtuous than Orholam. My false virtue—not modesty, pride—took the joy out of my marriage bed. I’d fought to maintain a virtue, and I thought that because I’d had to fight so hard, it must be the highest good. Giving up my claim to look down on those I didn’t approve of was like losing a limb. But do you know what it’s like to try to walk with three legs?”
It was getting uncomfortably close, and Kip was afraid of what she would say next. “You’ve seen me naked, you know I do,” he said. He grinned.
She shook her head like she knew she’d walked into that. She leveled her soup ladle at Kip’s nose. “Kip, serious hat on, or I make comments about your manhood that you’ll never forget.”
Kip swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
“Taking correction was like losing a limb to me, but it was worth it. A good father doesn’t let his children stay stuck. Orholam is a good father, Kip.”
“Right now, I’m more worried about being a good son.” Deflect, deflect, don’t let her ask what I should give up.
“Then you are wiser than your years,” she said, and he wondered if he’d been nervous for nothing or if she was letting him off easy. Then she got a twinkle in her eye. “Oh, and Kip…”
“Don’t. Please don’t. Please?”
“That’s no limb. A good strong sapling, maybe. Now my husband … That was a limb. Let’s just say maybe modesty wasn’t the only reason I fainted.”
“I said I was sorry,” Kip whinged.
She pinched his cheek. “I know, but you deserved it. Don’t worry. You’ve got more than ample to satisfy. Bigger than my own sons’, and if my daughters speak true, bigger than their husbands’, too.”
“Ah! I have to see these people!”
Chapter 16
Karris sipped her kopi quietly in the Crossroads. The stimulant was a poor choice for her anxiety. She was seated in the clerestory, facing the big, gorgeous stained glass windows that had once been the pride of the Tyrean embassy. She wondered how the owner of the Crossroads had been able to purchase this building, and what it had cost. In the years since the fall of Tyrea, it had become the city’s most fashionable kopi house, restaurant, brewery, smokehouse, and—downstairs, out of sight of those with tender sensibilities—the foremost brothel in the city.
For that matter, she wondered who the owner was.
Kind of thing that a spymistress should be able to learn, isn’t it?
She wasn’t kept waiting long. She supposed that was one of the perquisites of her new position. She was the White’s right hand, and no one would keep the White waiting. The man who sat across from her was an Ilytian banker, the scion of one of the great merchant banking families, the Onestos, twenty-five years old, and probably just now being treated as an adult, brought home from learning his trade in one of the satrapies and now entrusted with meeting the Prism’s bride—or widow. At twenty-five, he could be treated as barely an adult because he still had another fifty years left in his mortal span. How different the lives of munds.
