by Brent Weeks
“There’s no evidence that the Color Prince’s people have done any of this,” Ben-hadad said uncomfortably.
“This is what they want us to go back to!”
“They probably don’t even know about this,” Ben-hadad said. “It’s here, in this library. How would—”
“Are you on their side?” Cruxer asked. “You read it, you tell me if such things don’t go a long way to explaining why the Chromeria sent luxors out into the world.”
The table fell silent. Of all them, Quentin looked worst. “That was a … dark chapter in the Magisterium’s history. We don’t even like to speak of it.”
Teia said, “I’ve heard rumors that some of the High Luxiats themselves have been agitating to give the Office of Doctrine some of their old powers again.”
Quentin shook his head. “Other luxiats have foolishly said such things, yes, but I don’t think it goes that high.”
“They haven’t squashed those rumors, though,” Kip said.
“They’re scared,” Quentin said. “But they’re wiser than scared. We can trust them.”
“I’m sure people thought that the first time the luxors were established,” Ben-hadad said.
“Quentin’s right, though,” Teia said. “They’re right to be scared. Every time we hear about the war, it’s about a loss like at Ruic Neck. Even the victories don’t make sense. A victory at Sitara’s Wells? And then two weeks later a victory at Amitton? Our armies marched backward as fast as they could to reach the next ‘victory’? I think we’re losing everywhere, and they’re lying about it.”
“Enough about the war,” Cruxer said. “I don’t think we should be looking at these books anymore. These volumes were restricted for good reason. I think this knowledge deserves to be lost.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ben-hadad said.
“Look at what I just read,” Cruxer said. “I can’t unlearn that! I didn’t even read you all of it. It’s worse. And I didn’t even finish. What’s wrong with saying that in some cases, other people know best?”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone to know what’s best for me,” Ben-hadad said.
“Then maybe you don’t belong in the Blackguard,” Cruxer snapped, “because that’s what you agree to every time you take an order.”
“Enough!” Kip said. “Cruxer, I’m sorry you had to read that. If you need to stop, stop. But I need to do this.”
“Do you? You don’t even know what you’re looking for.”
It was a sore spot. They’d looked through a mind-numbing number of genealogies: Klytos Blue was, like most nobles, related to nearly everyone, and though they’d found hints of dozens of scandals, none involved Klytos directly. It was getting harder not to conclude that they’d been wasting their time. Kip shot back, “If you can’t handle the horror of what man can do to man, maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t be in the Blackguard.”
The table fell silent.
Cruxer’s ever-warm eyes chilled. “Breaker, we’re going to be part of this war, like it or not. It’s going to kill some of us at this table. And it’s going to change all of us. It doesn’t mean we should be eager for those changes. Most of them aren’t good.”
“These books could give us the edge we need to win,” Kip said.
“The best thing these books can do is to teach us forbidden magic.”
“For defense!” Teia said. “How we can defend against what we don’t even know?”
“Knowledge is a musket. You can use it only as a club, but will you? When your life is on the line? The miracle to me is that the luxiats were able to sequester this knowledge at all. Breaker, when I held Lucia in my arms as she was dying, in that moment, I would have damned myself with any magic known or unknown if it would have meant vengeance on her murderer.”
The faces around the table were somber. The young luxiat looked on the verge of fainting. Delicate sensibilities about damnation, Kip figured.
“There isn’t only the danger to our souls,” Cruxer said. “If we use these … the Color Prince’s drafters will, too.”
“If they can figure it out. They don’t have our books,” Teia said.
“They probably have their own books,” Ben-hadad said.
“But what if they learned it from fighting us,” Cruxer said. “Then they’d think they have to use these magics because we are.”
“They’re probably already working on all this,” Big Leo said. “This stuff is forbidden by us—who they hate and wish to destroy. Let’s be realistic; they’re not going to be held back by beliefs they don’t share.”
“We’re talking about starting an arms race,” Cruxer said.
Teia said, “We’re not starting it; we’re just starting to run before they cross the finish line.”
“The only way out of an arms race is to win,” Ben-hadad said.
“In such victories, all men lose,” Cruxer said.
“Better to lose your idealism than your life,” Kip said.
“You all agree with this?” Cruxer asked.
No one looked excited about it, but there were nods all around. “Maybe we should listen to Kip on this, Captain,” Ferkudi said. “I mean, he is the Li— Ow! What the hell, Teia?!” He rubbed his rib.
She stared at him. Around the table, smirks were being suppressed.
“Oh, right, we weren’t going to talk about the Li …, the li … littlest squad member?” Ferkudi said.
There were groans around the table. Big Leo buried his face in his hands.
“This again?” Kip said. He knew they’d speculated. Everyone wants to live at a pivotal time in history, right? And if you weren’t arrogant enough to delude yourself into thinking you were the Lightbringer, surely the second best thing would be thinking you knew him. “Not all of you, though?”
“Sooo,” Teia said, redirecting. “Yes, Captain, we all agree.”
Cruxer blew out a breath. He looked from face to face. “I can’t lead where you won’t follow, so I’m in. But I want you all to remember this. We had a choice here.”
Kip wanted to follow up about the Lightbringer silliness, but after the ominous gravity of that, it was too awkward.
They fell back to their studies. Gradually, they got back to their complaints about the archaic diction or how much work the magisters were expecting them to master or their Blackguard training or, in Quentin’s case, with how he couldn’t figure out the organization of the restricted library yet, which didn’t follow any of the usual schema.
When they were getting up to leave, Cruxer pulled Ben-hadad aside. “Ben. A word.”
Kip hung back.
“Ben, this squad is like a body. We’ve all got our different parts to play, but we need to work together. I need to know—”
“This is about me saying I don’t trust anyone to know best for me?” Ben-hadad asked.
“That’s right.”
“Crux,” Ben-hadad said. “I don’t trust you to know what’s best for me. But I trust you to know what’s best for the squad. For the Blackguard. And they matter more than I do. That’s why I take your orders. And why I will. To the death.”
Cruxer’s whole demeanor eased, and he was suddenly less worried leader and more happy young man, glad to have a friend back.
“Besides,” Ben-hadad said. “Every body needs an asshole.”
Cruxer groaned.
“Did you hear that?” Kip said. “He just volunteered to take all the squad’s shit.”
“I didn’t mean I was the asshole!” Ben-hadad said.
“It always comes back to poop jokes, doesn’t it?” Cruxer said.
“In sailing, the poop by definition is at the—” Teia started.
“Don’t.”
“Ah, just one crappy—”
“No.”
Chapter 41
It seemed that every time that Kip thought he’d seen all of the Chromeria, he found out that there was much, much more to it. Today, he was meeting Karris in the workshops beneath the blue tower. There
were smelters and glass furnaces here, racks of tools lining every wall, and at least a hundred men and women swarming, drafters and non-drafters each at their appointed task.
Despite the furnaces burning along one wall, there was no smoke, and the temperature was only slightly elevated. Vents were everywhere—for air, but also for light. The purest lenses Kip had ever seen cast spotlights in perfect colors for drafting onto tables. This was where the work of light-crafting and research into practical applications for luxin was conducted. Everywhere, he saw people looking at papers or slates holding calculations they’d done in the study rooms above, checking them against what they were seeing in practice.
Kip saw his tutor standing next to a plain, fair-skinned woman with her blonde hair pulled in a severe ponytail, sleeves rolled up, skin stained faintly green and yellow, though she couldn’t have been much more than thirty years old. Burning through her life fast.
Seeing Karris beckon him, Kip walked over. Since she’d started tutoring Kip, Karris had begun wearing the finest dresses and newest fashions. Kip had asked her about it once, and she said that with her short, lean figure, people constantly took her for younger than she was and questioned her—challenged her, in her eyes—far too often. By looking as rich as a Guile, Karris forestalled hassles. Kip knew she would have preferred to wear her blacks instead, but she only wore those when she and Kip trained together, and even then, despite the cost of clothing, her “blacks” were red or green rather than black. That part of her life was dead, she said. And the even way she said it, never looking Kip in the eye, told him how much it grieved her.
“This is Lady Phoebe Kalligenaea,” Karris said. Her hair recently was a chestnut brown with lighter highlights, rich-looking and boring. She was also growing it out longer than she ever would have worn it as a Blackguard.
“She’s got the finest control of any yellow superchromat known. Including Gavin. Lady Kalligenaea, this is my husband’s son, Kip.”
“Mistress Phoebe will do,” the woman said. “I’m a master crafter, and down here, that means more than a silly title passed down through accidents of birth.”
“Isn’t being a yellow superchromat an accident of birth, too?” Kip asked.
Kip the Lip. But this time he didn’t squint his eyes and sink into his embarrassment. He watched her instead.
“Aha! Maybe so, but I work to make the most of this accident. The other I avoid as much as possible.” She grinned, and revealed a big gap between her front teeth.
“So you’re better than the Prism?” Kip asked.
She looked like she’d bit a lemon. “At small things. I could never make Brightwater Wall, that’s for sure.”
“What are you better at?”
Mistress Phoebe looked over at Karris. “Direct, isn’t he?”
“It’s refreshing,” Karris said. “At times.” She gave Kip the look. He understood.
“I’ve worked with the Prism, taught him,” Mistress Kalligenaea said. “Luxin makes sense to him. Karris tells me you’re same. His signature is magic that is beautiful and breathtaking in its sheer audacity—a whole wall of yellow luxin, who would dare such a thing? Much less dare it while an army was closing in? But … it lacks a certain elegance. Made of yellow, you could have a wall that still meets the requirements for strength—that is, capable of taking sustained cannon blasts—at maybe a third the thickness Gavin chose. When he isn’t sure, he opts for more, always more, rather than to sit with paper and abacus.
“It’s not a sharp criticism, mind you. If you have unlimited drafting potential, using more because it’s quicker is a logical choice. The rest of us would burn out that way in days. We must opt for elegance over force. The other thing Gavin does well is that he remembers everything. It’s sort of nauseating, to be quite frank. Once he gets a design right, I’ll see him staring at it, turning it over in his hands, and then it’s in his head. Ten years go by, and you ask him to reproduce the same cooling rack for bread, and he does it. It’s a marvel. But! We aren’t here to talk about Gavin Guile, we’re here to teach you. They tell me you’re a superchromat.”
The words of his testers echoed in his ears: freak. “Some would say a superchromat boy is like a dog that can bark, ‘I love you’—”
“‘A novelty, not a precedent’?” Her nose crinkled. “Tawenza Goldeneyes is a gifted tutor, better than I. She’s also a bitch. Karris told me she refused to tutor you. Even after Karris came down on her. Flat refused.”
“Called me a strumpet,” Karris said. She did not seem to find it humorous.
“Sorry?” Kip said.
“No matter. If she hadn’t, Lady—Mistress Phoebe wouldn’t have taken you on,” Karris said.
“You understand, if I take you on, and you ever get a chance to show up Goldeneye’s discipulae, I want you to do it. Which means you have to be better than they are.”
Kip grinned. “With pleasure. I’m at least that much like my father.”
“Can you draft a stable solid yellow?”
“On a good day,” Kip said.
“By the time I’m done with you, you’ll have memorized how to make a yellow sword, from memory, within … eh, eight seconds.”
“Three,” Karris said. “At most. By Sun Day.”
For a moment, Kip remembered scrabbling around on the old battlefield at Sundered Rock, looking for the telltale gleam of yellow luxin in the rising sunlight. Solid yellow luxin was the most valuable for resale. Picking through the mud, spitting on rocks and rubbing them clear with an already grubby sleeve, hoping against hope he could pay for dinner tonight instead of relying on charity again and hating himself, and hating his mother, and feeling guilty for it.
It was all different now. He wasn’t sure why, with all the radical changes he’d been through, that somehow this little one struck him.
If I ever lose it all, I could still make a better living than I ever could have imagined back in Rekton, just by drafting bits of yellow luxin to sell.
All the inherited wealth and position were somehow external. But this tiny little thing was somehow his. He would never go back to who he’d been. Couldn’t.
“Four months?” Mistress Phoebe was saying. “Hmm. You have your father’s memory? You as smart as he is?”
“No, and not even close,” Kip said, coming back to the moment, pushing all that self-indulgent nonsense away.
“More modest, at least, not that that’s hard,” Mistress Phoebe said. “Good. It’ll make you work more than he ever did. Us mere mortals work for our bread and board. One hour a day, young Guile.”
“Every other day,” Karris said. “He’s got six other colors to practice, and Blackguard training.”
Kip groaned. Quietly. Karris would let him get away with that much.
“Sad,” Mistress Phoebe said. “I had all sorts of onerous chores I was looking forward to him performing. Looks like it’ll be study only instead.”
And so it had gone, with every color. Kip didn’t know how Karris bullied, blackmailed, or begged, but she got him tutors in every color. She kept him in some of his classes—engineering and a basic history course—but had him skip others. The time for hagiographies would have to be later, she said, if he lived. Without exception, his tutors were excellent. Some of them were the best in their field, like Mistress Phoebe. Others were simply great teachers.
Karris taught him fighting herself, incorporating drafting with the purely mundane fighting that the Blackguard inductees mostly did. She said that once the rest of the nunks did start to incorporate drafting, Kip would either get much better than average or much worse: the others had only one or two types of luxin to figure out how to use in fighting. Kip had seven.
There was too much to learn in a man’s lifetime, she said, and a woman would be weak in body by the time she learned it all. But she’d teach him as much as she could.
And she was a good teacher, despite the handicap of having to teach him drafting while being forbidden to draft herself. She had an unca
nny instinct for knowing when he tried to ease up, but she wasn’t cruel.
He could tell that she was figuring out her own new roles, too. When she walked with him from the blue tower workshops into the big practice field where the Blackguards met, he saw a flash of grief in her eyes.
Trainer Fisk saluted her, hand to heart. She moved to salute back, then stopped herself and nodded to him instead, a lady, not a Blackguard.
Kip had a thought before he jogged over to get in line, and blurted it out: “He’s coming back. I swear.”
She didn’t try to deny she’d been thinking about it. “The world isn’t always so merciful, Kip.” She turned and left abruptly, head held high. Something in the rigidity of it told Kip that it was that or collapse.
So unlike his own mother, for whom the least harsh word was an excuse to smoke more haze or drown in a bottle. He wished his mother had been half the woman Karris was.
And that thought led him to Zymun. Orholam’s shit. Kip’s oath, offered so readily, buying what he needed with the coin he didn’t want to keep, was seeming more expensive by the day.
From Andross, who still played him regularly, Kip learned that Karris had disappeared after the war, only coming back to the Chromeria more than a year later.
That hadn’t been uncommon. Families had been destroyed in any of a dozen ways by the war, and many of the old guard hadn’t come back at all after Sundered Rock. Others had been gone for long periods simply trying to repair the damage done to their estates in their respective satrapies, having to hire and train new people to take over from those killed or exiled in the war. The old indolence so many families had been able to afford before the war was simply gone. An absence of a year for the scion of a once-great family had been unremarkable.
Andross said it had taken him a long time to find out what had happened. Karris had stayed with some distant relations in Blood Forest and left the child with them.
She still thought it a secret. But even if Kip were willing to risk Andross’s wrath by breaking his word to him, how do you pull someone’s secret shame out into the light, and then make it worse?
