by Brent Weeks
Kip turned away, to where the invisible hands were writing, drawing, etching, hammering. That was the crux, that was the present, that was where the answer lay.
A short inhuman roar, the size of the creature that the man disguised, sounded. Abaddon did not like being dismissed.
Kip flinched, and out of body, out of time, and all that he might be, he was still surprised he didn’t wet himself at the noise. But he didn’t turn. If that thing wanted to kill him, if it was allowed to do so by whatever murky rules governed this place, there was clearly nothing Kip could do to stop it.
“Know this, Diakoptês, I may not be allowed to kill you here, but my hands are not bound in—” He stopped. “Should you leave, I will follow, and there is no foe who compares.”
“Shut it. I’m thinking.” Oh Ramir, I never thought I would have a reason to thank you for anything, but for this I thank you, you small-souled, small-hearted, small-town tough: I know how to needle a bully when he can’t get to me. For that, thank you.
Now, why am I in the Great Library?
It’s the repository of all knowledge. So what does that—
Kip looked at the invisible hands again. They were drawing glyphs right now. Pictures as words. Pictures as knowledge. Knowledge in every language, in every medium.
Perhaps even the knowledge in cards. Perhaps even the knowledge in cards inside careless young fools.
I’m here because this place is the repository of all knowledge, and I’m here until I get all this knowledge out.
Kip looked down at himself for the first time. He was absolutely covered in tattoos. On every exposed bit of skin, every place a card had stuck to him, it had left its image. Perhaps they’d left more than their image, perhaps they’d left their essence. It didn’t fully make sense to him. Why hadn’t the cards come here the moment of their creation? But maybe he was asking a time-bound question—time that he was running out of.
He turned over his left wrist.
Gunner.
The crazed Ilytian was wearing a waistcoat, open over a naked torso, sailor’s loose pants, no shoes, and a huge grin. He was seated on a smoking cannon like he was riding it. It was bigger than any cannon Kip had ever seen. Gunner also had a blunderbuss in his left hand and a pistol with multiple long barrels in his right hand. Like the first time Kip had seen him, the man had woven burning slow matches into his long unruly hair and beard and into his waistcoat to make himself look like he had come striding out of hell. Gunner? I’ve got to go be Gunner?
Fine, Gunner, let’s dance.
Kip bunched his fingers in the familiar pattern to touch the five jewels: one at each corner, and the middle finger at the middle top. One at a time, he pressed them onto the tattoo of Gunner, fully expecting nothing to happ—
~Gunner~
Tap. Superviolet and blue. As his thumb touched, it was like someone had blown out a candle. The world went dark. Eyes useless. But then, a moment later, there was sun, waves washing over him, blinking, bobbing. Seeing his perspective shift while he felt his body utterly motionless made him queasy.
Tap. Green solved that in a rush of embodiment, touch restored. He was swimming. A strong body, wiry, naked to the waist. The water is warm, strewn with flotsam.
Tap. Yellow. Hearing restored, the shouts of men calling to each other, others screaming in pain or terror. But yellow is more than that; it is the logic of man and place. But the yellow in this one isn’t quite right. Disbelieving. The Prism came out of nowhere. Dodged all his cannon shots. Even when Gunner finally started shooting both at once. That little boat the Prism made moved at speeds he wouldn’t have believed if he’d heard another telling the tale. Ceres is going to take this out on him. Damn Gavin Guile.
But this mind skips around. There’s something—
Tap. Orange. The smell of the sea and smoke and discharged powder, and he can sense the other men floating in the water, and below them, around them— Oh, by the hells. Sharks. Lots of sharks.
His finger is already descending. Tap. Red-and-sub-red-and-the-taste-of-blood-in-his-mouth-and-it’s-too—
The trick with sharks is the nose. Not so different from a man. You bloody a bully’s nose, and he goes looking elsewhere right quick. Easy, right? Easy.
Gunner ain’t no easy meat. The sea’s my mirror. Fickle as me. Crazy as me. Deep currents, and monsters rise from her depths, too. What others call sea spray, I call her spitting in my face, friendly like—
Kip tore his hand away as soon as it touched all the points—instantly—but that instant was minutes long in the card. He’d not left until he’d—until Gunner had killed a shipmate named Conner, who had the oars. Kip had just seen Gunner make himself a captain and get his first crew. The benighted madman.
Finding himself back in the Great Library, Kip looked down at his wrist. The tattoo was faded, but not gone. Right in front of him, a hand had drawn half of the card, hanging in midair. And now it stopped.
He had to go back into the same one. There was something important about Gunner. He had to find the right time. He had no idea what he was doing, but he had to learn.
Kip’s fingers descended into a raid on an Angari ship, the murder of men, the lopping of limbs, and a little singsong, ‘Rinky, sinky, dinky, do.’ He pulled his hand off again, unable to bear it.
And the tattoo still wasn’t gone.
Twice more he submerged himself into that ill-fitting skin, and emerged, gasping, weeping. But the card before him was being drawn, and split: one copy flew to his hand, and one went winging to a shelf.
Time out of joint, Kip stares at his wrist. The Gunner tattoo is disappearing even as the hands finish drawing the card. But then his tattoos move, shift, rearrange themselves, and there on his wrist sits Samila Sayeh, the heroine from the Prisms’ War.
“You’ll never make it,” Abaddon said. For some reason, his coat was gone, but he had a cloak of the same black and white leather spread in his hands. “Even if you could live every card in turn. Even if any human could take that much punishment, you don’t have the time.”
Kip didn’t answer. There was no answer. There was no giving up.
“Samila, let’s dance.” His hand came down.
But it didn’t end with Samila. It didn’t end with Helane Troas. It didn’t end with Viv Grayskin. It didn’t end with Aheyyad Brightwater or Usem the Wild or Halo Breaker or the Fallen Prophet or Pleiad Poros or the Novist or Orlov Kunar or New Green Wight or Heresy.
He was dimly aware that after he finished each tattoo each card flew off into the library, and at least once he saw Abaddon sweep the cloak out like a net, trying to catch a card before it disappeared, but each card seemed to fly right through it, barely slowed. It was one too many things to worry about. Kip went into card after card, sands running out.
Every time, when he felt for whatever reason that he’d seen enough, he removed his hand. He barely had any awareness of himself, none, perhaps, until the moment came to take his hand away. Nor was there any processing of the memories. He had no idea who the majority of these people and things were; he didn’t even connect Vox from the Shimmercloak card and from Janus Borig’s home until his hand was descending onto the next tattoo.
The integration of Kip to card was complete, but the disintegration that followed was ever incomplete: it wasn’t merely a melding of mind to mind, it was union. Spiritual. Emotional. And definitely physical. When he came back from a man who’d lost an arm, he felt the pain, not just after that card to be blotted out by the next card, but after that next card, too. The list of injuries piled up, and even without them, he was seeing men and women at the pivotal crises of their lives: terror was the norm, physical battle common, hatred and cowardice and heroism all piled together.
At first, he regathered his wits each time, reminded himself who he was, wiped away what blood he could from his bleeding nose, took a breath, then tapped the next. Then he merely took a breath, glaring at Abaddon, feeling wetness trickling from his ears. He died a hero�
��s death. He betrayed his closest friends. He took his own life, screaming a spray of teeth as he fired the blunderbuss pointed at his chin.
He found himself on his knees, weeping, blood and tears covering his wrist. But he didn’t stop. He wiped his forehead with an arm, giving himself a single breath. His forearm came away bloody. He was sweating blood. That couldn’t be good.
“No,” Abaddon said, dismayed.
Hand down. The Technologist. What the hell? This was Ben-hadad. He was some kind of genius. Never would have guessed.
“I—”
Hand down. The Commander. It was Cruxer, and not just Cruxer now, but Cruxer as he would be, facing—but as soon as Kip lifted his hand, he lost the future parts.
“—won’t—”
Hand down. Incipient Wight. And Kip lived the conversion, saw the how, and the why, and what worked, and what the wight thought worked, but some still part of Kip saw it was a delusion.
“—allow—”
Hand down. High Luxiat. The man was only beneath the Prism in the future. But first, as a young man, Quentin was taking an order from—from Brother Tawleb. Raising a pistol in a familiar alley. Missing. Blood squirting from a young woman’s neck as she stepped into the line of fire. Soul horror at the mistake.
Something about that—Lucia?—no, no time.
“—this.”
Three cards left. Kip was going to make it.
Beneath the blood and tears and mud obscuring his wrist, Kip saw the next card slide into place: the Butcher of Aghbalu. Orholam, no. That was Tremblefist’s card. No, no, no.
He couldn’t let himself think.
Hand down.
The perfect joy of battle rage, the heady potency of matching skill to skill and overmatching each, of tearing what every man valued most from his arms and proving, time and again, to be the best, to be untouchable, to be godlike in his power, in his slaying grace, to be so feared that bowels loosened and hearts literally stopped as the shadow of this avenging god fell upon them. The agony sang inside him and found company in the agony he left—lopping off hands and feet and leaving men to bleed, gut-wounding others, slashing off jaws, eviscerating, crushing faces, and killing, killing, killing. His palace became his charnel house. He returned to the maimed and sometimes found their women comforting them, and he killed their women before them, that their agony might pitch higher before they knew the release of death.
And it was not enough. The rage ran hot, the rage ran cold, the rage ran out, and still he was killing when the sun rose. And the sun showed that he had not only killed enemies. His own slaves lay dead among their new masters, the Tiru. He had no recollection of killing them, aside from some half-remembered screams, but the wounds matched the wounds he’d left in five hundred others.
He staggers back to the upper court where his wife lies dead, almost unrecognizable from the beatings, raped to death by the invaders. He goes there to end it.
He drops the double swords from gory hands. Pulls her into his arms as the sun rises. Smears the blood away from her broken, battered face. Rearranges her bloody torn dress into some pathetic semblance of decency. Holds her in his arms, draws his dagger.
This woman has a mole on her neck.
This woman isn’t Tazerwalt. This isn’t his wife. This is her handmaid, Hada, dressed in her lady’s garments.
He stands, trembling, an image flashing through his head, a slave girl rushing him. A horrid intuition. A sickness unto death. A stone in his gullet.
He finds the room. Tazerwalt. His wife, disguised as a slave. She’d been alive, unharmed by the Tiru attackers, hidden, until he’d come. A slave girl had rushed him. A slave girl, loyal to the Tiru, surely. Thinking it an attack, he’d slashed her neck as she threw herself at him, and he’d moved on, heedless.
Her eyes are open, questioning, and dead. So very dead.
He falls to his knees, screaming. Mind tearing, separating from himself. He sees a man, caked in blood, screaming. His screams sound no different than any of a hundred others he’s heard all night. His throat is tearing, unable to contain the force of his suffering.
Kip lifted his hand, convulsing. For some reason, his whole body was in pain, as if all his muscles had cramped at once. He fell over, blinded, unable to breathe. The wave passed, leaving him gasping. He blinked his suddenly clouded eyes clear. Wiped at them. Looked at red fingers. Touched his forehead. No, no wounds to his scalp or forehead. He was bleeding from his eyes.
That, Ferkudi would say, was a real flesh protuberance.
“You’re too late. You’re dying,” Abaddon said, sweeping the cloak back up onto his shoulders. “All this suffering for nothing.”
A sound escaped Kip’s lips, and for all the times he’d hated his body for its petty betrayals and awkwardness, this time, it did him proud: the sound was far more growl than moan. Emboldened by his own flimsy façade of defiance, Kip rolled to his knees.
“You’re wrong,” he said, voice raspy, breath short. “See, I have a gift.”
“A few.”
“No, just the one.”
“Pray tell.”
“I’m fat. So I’m out of breath. Maybe dying. Hell, I’ve felt worse climbing a flight of stairs.” I’m fat, he didn’t have the breath to say, but when everything’s hard for you, something being hard isn’t much deterrent to doing it anyway. I’m fat, and there’s only one person in this room who gets to make jokes about me.
But Abaddon was grinning. “You’ve already lost, Lard Guile. This wasn’t me visiting you in the Great Library. This was a raid. Your coming here broke open a gap in our enemies’ defenses. You’re so predictable. By stalling you, I made you hurry. I could never have found all the new cards myself. You brought them to me.” He spread the cloak open, and on the white inside, Kip saw images, like tattoos, of every single card. They hadn’t escaped Abaddon—he’d somehow copied them all.
Kip had no idea what it meant, but something Corvan had said once made him react instinctively: ‘If your enemy wants it, deny it.’
Andross Guile, you asshole, tell me that I’ve got something of you in me. Your every victory, your every taunt, every time you turned a loss into a victory of another sort and soured the wine of winning to gall in my very mouth. Speak, O blood of Guile. Sing in me of the rage of the man skilled in all ways of contending. Sing of the blood of a beast and a god—
Blood.
Kip scrapes the blood from his wrist, feeling lightheaded. Only two images remain. He laughs, for the final two tattoos are the Lightbringer and the Turtle-Bear. But these two sit side by side in his wrist.
A choice. Kip has no doubt of it. There is only time to touch one. The image of the Lightbringer looks holy, a beam of light from heaven illuminating his face, washing out his features so it’s impossible to discern them.
Janus Borig asked for her brushes when she was dying. Asked for them, because she knew who the Lightbringer was. Had she started that card and never finished the face?
No. This tattoo isn’t unfinished.
What it is, or what it can be, is a trap. A trap for Kip—and now Kip’s trap.
Kip lifts his hand, bunches his fingers, using the periphery of his vision to see how Abaddon reacts. Fear that Kip will touch the Lightbringer. Good. Kip moves.
“No!” Abaddon shouts. “No!” He twists his cane and a blade flicks out from its heel. He stabs Kip’s arm in the tattoo of the Lightbringer. Power arcs through Abaddon’s cane, and the tattoo bursts apart like a popped soap bubble. Too easily, as if it had been waiting for it.
Kip flips sideways from the force of the blow, his other hand slapping at Abaddon’s face as he falls.
When he looks up, Abaddon looks confused. There’s a hole in the illusions hiding his face, his chin and beard plucked off entirely, the rest of the mask shimmering—and dissolving.
He is no man under that projected beauty. His head a locust’s head. His mouth mandibles, stretching and snapping sideways. His eyes monstrous, inhuman. The wings b
arely protruding from his back are the clacking wings of an insect god. And the moment he touches Kip, there’s a change in the air of the Great Library. Even Kip, bent and broken, can feel the power gathering, a kind of magic beyond mortal ken.
By touching Kip, he’s entered Kip’s time, his bubble of causality. And if there’s one thing fat kids understand, after getting beat down into a puddle of blubber and humiliation, it’s being overlooked and disregarded.
But blubber bounces back.
Shooting a look at something Kip couldn’t see, Abaddon roared, “What do I care for your rules?! I am I! I am the Day Star! I am of the firstborn, and I. Will. Not. Be Moved!” His turn swept the hem of his cloak toward Kip, almost brushing him with it.
If there’s one thing fat kids understand, it’s momentum.
With a roar, Kip leapt onto Abaddon’s back. Every Blackguard lesson forgotten, he was an animal, tearing at his prey. He was the fucking turtle-bear, ready to take punishment as long as he could give more punishment back. His weight nearly knocked Abaddon off his broken ankles, and Abaddon barely caught himself on his cane. Screaming, Kip scratched at his eyes, tore at his neck, and lunged for that precious pistol.
But the move was a feint. With only one hand free, Abaddon grabbed on to his precious pistol. Instead, Kip tore the cloak off his neck and kicked off. Abaddon fell.
His masks down, Abaddon was all snarling, shrieking insect. He drew the pistol from its holster smoothly, those great bulbous eyes unreadable.
At that moment, something seemed to resound through the entire library, a great pulse, a great weight settling—and Abaddon was ejected, utterly, instantly. Not physically, for he merely disappeared, but Kip had the very distinct impression that the psychic shock of it had to be tremendous.
It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved—and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness.
