by Brent Weeks
“Your choice now is simple. If you wish to marry that girl and be my spy—and live—come by and talk to me before you leave. Choose what you will, but if you’re here tomorrow, you’ll be dead before sunset.” He cocked his head at a sound. “I’ve stayed overlong. Decide well, Diakoptês, or it will not be your dreams alone that will be broken this night.”
He hit the light control on the wall, and left Kip in darkness.
Chapter 80
~Black Luxin~
“Mother,” I yell. “Mother!” I come running in from the street as usual.
Jarae stops me before I even get past the entry. She’s a dour figure, looming in doorways, but quicker than you’d suspect with her bulk. “Shoes, young master, shoes!”
I step on one heel after the other, kicking them off without a thought. “Where is she, Jaejae?”
“In the garden, Dazen, but she’s—”
I’m already off. The slaves are settling us in to our new home on Big Jasper, dusting, and rolling out carpets, washing bedthings, and moving furniture. Two young men in sleeveless tunics, arms knotted and muscular, are carrying a lounge chair across the hallway. I speed up.
They don’t see me until too late, and I see their eyes widen as it looks like I’m going to collide with them. They brace themselves.
I drop to my knees at the last second and slide right under the heavy chair. I pop back up to my feet with a whoop.
“You nearly gave me a fit, you d— young master!” one of them shouts after me.
Yes! Now that he’s shouted at me, I know he won’t report me to father, lest I tattle back on him.
Farther down, a bed is in the hallway, but no one’s carrying it. I jump and slide over the top, but get tangled in the dusty sheets covering it and fall on the other side, smacking my knee. I pull the dusty sheets behind me for a good twenty paces as I try to get disentangled. I leave it in the hall, all of its dust deposited on me, and hobble into the garden.
“Mother!” I shout.
“I’m right here, Dazen. You should come and meet—”
But I’m already running, and I jump into her arms.
She laughs and spins me around once, then puts me down. “Dazen, you are getting too big to—what is this? You’re filthy!”
I have put about a sev of dust on her pretty blue dress.
“Sorry, mother!” I say. I know she’s not really mad.
She sighs. “Never you mind. Dazen, I’d like you to meet my guest and my dear friend, Lady Janus Borig.”
Lady Borig is seated in one of the wrought iron chairs, and she’s old. Gray-and-red hair, pulled back tight under her hat, long nose, bright eyes. She’s smoking a long-stemmed meerschaum pipe adorned with rubies. The faded freckles on her arms and the red in her hair say she’s a Blood Forester. Gavin’s been teaching me all the old-fashioned court rituals of the satrapies.
“Mother,” I say.
“Dazen, greet our guest.”
“Mother, your shawl, please.”
I draw myself to what my tutor calls a proper little lordling’s pose. My mother hands me her shawl. I drape it over my shoulders, adjust it, and sweep into the old courtier’s bow of the Forest Court. One needs a cloak to do it properly. “Lady Borig, may your roots grow deep, and the circular skies bring you sun and shade in perfect proportion. May your herds increase, may your sons be unto you like a quiver full of arrows, may the small folk fear you, and may the tygre wolves hunt only your enemies.” Whew, almost forgot the last part.
Lady Janus Borig studies me silently.
“His father’s memory, I’m afraid,” mother says.
“And his mother’s charm. I seem to recall you stealing hearts when you were his age, too.”
“I spoil him,” my mother says. “I know it’s not good.”
“But you continue because.” Lady Janus Borig waves her pipe vaguely. In the direction of my father? I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“Exactly.”
“Please,” Lady Janus Borig says, “take your time with your son. The matter between you and me can wait. Pretend I’m not here.”
I look at her, then at my mother. This is all kinds of backwards. Adults never want to wait while children speak first. I can’t imagine father saying such a thing, not even with Gavin. But she seems serious.
“You were out with Magister Kyros?” my mother prompts.
“After lessons, we were playing at the Great Fountain, and I was talking to some of the other boys, and they said they’d learned from their tutor about other kinds of luxin that Magister Kyros won’t teach me about. They said it’s because I’m not smart enough. They said it’s too advanced. I asked him about it, and he wouldn’t say anything. It’s true, isn’t it?”
My mother’s face darkens, and the whole world darkens with it. “Let me guess, the White Oak boys again? You know they’ll be looking for an excuse to hurt you after your brother blackened Tavos’s eye last week.”
“I know, mother, I wasn’t trying to be around—” Oh no.
“So it was Gavin who hit him. Last week you said you had no idea what happened.”
I’ve let it out of the bag again. Gavin’s going to hit me for that.
“Mother, you tricked me!”
“Son, you lied to me.”
Quick. “There’s so many of them, wherever my tutors take me, there’s one of them there.”
“Yes, son, and it behooves you to remember that.”
“What, mother?”
“There’s more of them than there are of us.”
I sniff and raise my chin, just like father. “Ain’t afraid of nothing. I’m Guile.”
Mother laughs despite herself. She covers her mouth and smothers it, but her eyes are light again, and I know she won’t be mad at me anymore. “Oh, my little man, you’re growing up fast, aren’t you?” She looks over at Lady Janus Borig. “You see?”
“Indeed,” the old woman says. She doesn’t sound pleased.
“Growing up fast enough to be told about the luxins?” I ask hopefully. I see my opportunity slipping away.
She scowls and I do my best to look cute and harmless. She sighs. “Don’t tell your father?” she says.
“Promise!”
My mother pauses, though. She turns. “Lady Borig?” she asks. “Somehow, I think your own knowledge of that might be just a bit larger than my own.”
“Indeed.” Lady Borig’s index finger suddenly glows hot, and she sticks it into the bowl of her pipe, reigniting the ashes. A sub-red drafter. She puffs on the pipe for a time until she’s enveloped in a cloud. “How much do you want me to tell him? For that matter, how much do you want me to tell you? ’Tis the stuff of nightmares.”
“You weren’t going to tell him about bla—”
“Indeed I was,” Lady Janus Borig says. “Your son is not simply precocious, Felia. He is terribly bright; he is handsome; he is charming; and you have spoiled him horribly. In other words, he has all the makings of a true monster.”
My mother blinks. No one talks to her like this.
“Though I wonder.” She takes a deep breath on her pipe, not merely drawing the smoke into her mouth, but inhaling it. Mother doesn’t say a word, which tells me that she respects this terrible old lady immensely. “I suppose his elder brother beats him from time to time?”
“Best of friends one minute, fiercest enemies the next.”
“Do you ever win those fights with Gavin?” the old woman asks me.
I shake my head, glowering.
“You think I don’t like you,” Lady Janus Borig says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m trying to save you.” She turns to my mother. “You should let those White Oak boys thrash him a few times.”
“What?!”
“You’re clever enough to pick one of the younger ones who won’t do real damage. Perhaps a broken nose spoiling Dazen’s looks a bit would be the best thing for him. And learning that he is not invincible, that would be best for the world,
I think.”
My mother lowers her voice. “Is this … is this your gift speaking?”
“Pshh. This isn’t prophecy. I’m simply wiser than you, girl.”
My mother blinks, but accepts the rebuke. Suddenly she seems very young.
“I’ll tell him of black luxin, but I’ll tell him true, or I’ll tell him nothing at all. I think it would be best for him. But you’re the one who will have to live with the screaming in the night from the bad dreams.”
“If he thinks he’s ready,” my mother says, and her eyes are burning.
“You said you’re not afraid of anything,” Lady Janus Borig says to me. “Are you afraid now?”
Click.
Suddenly, Kip was standing in total darkness. He was himself once more. Where was he? When was he?
He drafted sub-red and widened his eyes. It was his own room. Click? What had that been?
He strode to the door, opened it, peeked out. Andross Guile was barely disappearing down the hallway.
What in nine hells?
The card memory had taken almost no time at all. The click was the settling of the latch.
He hadn’t been certain until this moment, but now he knew: he’d lied to Teia. He had bungled everything, but he hadn’t sprung a Janus Borig trap. He hadn’t erased the cards. He’d absorbed them all—and he had a sudden, clear, sick conviction they were going to drive him mad.
Chapter 81
Teia only pretended to flee. As soon as Andross Guile kicked her out to talk to Kip, she walked hurriedly past the Blackguards standing watch and headed down the hall and out of sight. She summoned the lift, but didn’t get on.
Instead, she pulled up the hood of her cloak. She looked left and right, saw no one, and willed herself to become invisible.
Nothing.
She felt up in the neckline and found the choker, a narrow band of metal that was attached to the cloak at many points. She pulled it up against her neck. She trembled, a shudder of revulsion coursing through her.
No one collared their slaves on the Jaspers. It was considered gauche. Beatings and other discipline were to be carried out at home, not in public. To need to discipline one’s slave in public reflected poorly on your own mastery. Slaves, of course, knew that any public defiance, however satisfying, would be met with double punishment later.
Other cities, and other men, were not so civilized—or perhaps not so hypocritical. This wasn’t the first time Teia had worn a collar, but it was the first time she’d done so voluntarily. The feeling of constriction around her neck was almost unbearable.
Things to do, T. Not much time, T. Could come out any second. Still have to figure out how to use the damned thing.
She moved the loose necklace that held the little vial of oil aside. Her hands held the choker’s clasp loosely. Unmoving. She was breathing deeply, almost hyperventilating, and not clasping the damned clasp.
Chains. I’ve done everything in my life to get away from chains.
Part of her argued with that. Some garbage about differences between slavery and a cloak that empowered her. It didn’t change the visceral revulsion.
These are the chains I choose.
The chains I choose.
She cinched the choker tight and extended her will. Teeth shot out of the choker and sank into either side of her neck. They hurt so bad she doubled over and almost screamed.
And then her breath was taken for another reason. She could feel it. The cloak had a presence within it. It wasn’t a whole personality; instead—if the chirurgeons were correct, and cogitation took place in the human brain—it was as if the cloak had all the parts of a person’s brain that dealt with light splitting and magic sunk into it, with a whisper of personality there. To make this cloak, someone had given her life—or had it taken from her. The cloak knew how to split light in the ways that Teia had barely glimpsed when she broke into the White’s office.
In all her life, Teia had had to struggle for every excellence. She could sing, but had seen other slaves remember every note in a tune in one or two hearings. She could fight, but she’d seen other Blackguards combine throws and punches and kicks into series as fluidly as if fighting were a language and they were constructing elaborate arguments. Her own style was terse, fast, but ultimately simple, without nuance. She could look at Cruxer or Winsen and see that they were already maturing into the best in the world, their skills growing by leaps and bounds. That was beyond her, and always would be. Her speed would get no better. Her reach was terminally short. In a continuum that began with Big Leo and Kip and Ironfist, she was not strong. Her aim would improve, as would her knowledge of where and when to strike. Among the best, she would become mediocre, every scrap of her skill earned only by the most challenging labor.
Nor had she any excellence in her studies. Despite his difficulty reading, Ben-hadad could extemporize, looking at the gears and pulleys and weights and strengths of each luxin and designing machines as if it were play to him. Kip could memorize, and make great intuitive leaps. If study were scrivening, they wrote in a perfect hand, and illuminated their manuscripts for fun while the dullards caught up to them. By contrast, Teia held the quill in her fist.
At the touch of whatever will was animating the cloak, Teia knew two things immediately. First, light splitting at the level of the old mist walkers was as difficult as any magical or mundane skill in the world. It was as difficult as juggling and sprinting and singing at once. Blindfolded. Second—more importantly—it made sense to her.
Simply using this cloak would teach her more than any master could.
She already saw how this cloak was superior to the other. None of the cloaks—not even this one—split light beyond the visible spectrum. Sub-red was too long a wave to be diverted and reformed within the thin layer of fabric, and superviolet was too fine.
Even among lightsplitters, the only people who had a chance to be fully invisible to all spectra would be paryl drafters. A true mist walker might use a shimmercloak to handle visible light while using a paryl mist to handle the last two spectra herself.
And then it was obvious: they were called mist walkers not because they were invisible or could only be seen as though through a mist, but because they walked within their own cloud of paryl, always.
And this cloak would teach her how to do it.
Without ever expecting such a thing, Teia had found her purpose and her excellence. It was quite possible that no one in the world understood this like she did. For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel inferior. She would have started crying if she hadn’t heard the door open around the corner down the hall and Andross Guile grunt something to his Blackguards.
Drafting even a thread of paryl was enough to activate the cloak. Teia threw the hood up and reached to lace it up over her face. But there were no laces. She fumbled, looking for some kind of fasteners, and when she drew the edges close, they snapped shut firmly, as if lodestones were sewn into them. Much faster than the other shimmercloaks. Even with this cloak, though, she couldn’t cover her eyes completely unless she wanted to be blind: no light, no sight. It might be worth covering them in certain situations, but it would also be terrifying. Instead, she would have to rely on taking quick sidelong glances or creeping around at low levels where enemies wouldn’t be looking for eyes.
Being short helped the latter, of course, but she was going to have to take care that she not get overconfident.
The approach of Andross and his guards presented an instant problem. How much did she trust the cloak, really?
She took deep breaths as the three men approached and stood off to the side, sneaking only quick glances at them to keep her eyes hidden. They passed right by her.
A thrill went through her body from head to toe. Invisible!
Andross turned to his Blackguards as they waited for the lift and said, “I’ll be heading to my home. Immediately. Summon a squad of Lightguards to accompany us.”
Of course, they were insulted by tha
t, and of course, they said nothing, taking it like the professionals they were. But what Teia thought was odd was that she couldn’t remember Andross Guile ever going to his home on Big Jasper. Why would he be headed to his home now?
The lift appeared before Teia heard any response, if there was any.
Andross Guile was going to his home on Big Jasper on the very day that his lost grandson showed up at the docks? From how Samite told it, it sounded like the boy was announcing who he was to anyone who would listen. Teia couldn’t imagine Andross Guile going home if the boy was headed to the Chromeria. Andross Guile would go to where the center of action was—or have the action brought to him.
Which meant Andross Guile was having the boy taken to his home, to meet him away from spying eyes.
Well, other than Teia’s.
She suddenly grinned. She leaned out into the lift shaft to see where it stopped. Ground floor.
After waiting half a minute, she stepped onto another ring of the lift mechanism and set the weights. She descended slowly.
At the ground floor, she had to dodge several old luxiats piling into the lift. But they moved slowly, and she made it out with little trouble before they could observe that the weight settings of the lift seemed off.
She searched for Andross Guile then, and couldn’t see him anywhere. She went to the great, open door, soon to be shut for the evening, and spotted him through a swirl of white and black cloaks. He was heading out of the Chromeria. She followed.
There was something totally empowering, even intoxicating, about walking unseen. Here were the drafters of the world, the cream of the Seven Satrapies, and they couldn’t even see her. No wonder the Order’s assassins loved these cloaks, even without using them to their full potential. This was amazing.
It was also surprisingly challenging. Teia was used to ducking and dodging through a crowd, but it was one thing to brush past someone who barely saw you, and something altogether different to actually get run over by someone who didn’t see you at all. That, and the fact that the shimmercloak completely cut out her peripheral vision, made simply moving at a walk almost exhausting. She was constantly turning her head, sneaking glimpses of everything, adjusting the paryl bubble as the evening crowds head back across the bridge from Little Jasper to their homes on Big Jasper.
