Lightbringer 03 - The Broken Eye

by Brent Weeks

  “I’m too late,” Teia said. “I can’t … It’s like he made this hoping I’d try to disrupt it. If I touch them, she’ll die. But if I don’t touch them, she’ll die anyway. It’s somehow starving her heart. Her heart is dying. But if she so much as coughs … Kip, what do I do?”

  “Shhh, child,” the White said.

  Kip started. He didn’t even know she was awake. Didn’t know she could wake. Two Blackguards had stayed, but others had fled to get help.

  “Wake my room slave, Kip, and say nothing more for the moment. Adrasteia, get behind the curtain, please.”

  Kip walked to the slave’s closet and knocked. No response. He opened the door, and saw the old woman, snoring in her chair. “Caleen,” he said. “Caleen!”

  She snorted and opened her eyes, then followed him blearily. And slowly. Damn she was old. But by the time they got back, Teia had hidden.

  The White said, “It’s my time, Bilhah. Summon High Luxiat Selene. Ask no one else to come in. I don’t wish my end to be all a clamor and panic.”

  Bilhah shuffled out past the Blackguards, slowly.

  When the door closed behind her, Teia came out from behind the curtain. She asked, “Why did I have to hide? I mean, why’d I have to hide from her?”

  “So you wouldn’t have to kill her,” the White said. “She’s been reporting to Andross Guile for ten years now. She has a grandson she loves.”

  “And Andross used it against her,” Kip said bitterly. He didn’t know why it was hard to believe his grandfather had hired an assassin—the old monster had done it before. But still. Kip had played games with Andross. Andross was even charming sometimes. And a murderer. Killing people like they were cards to be cleared from the play surface.

  “Why didn’t you sell her?” Teia asked. “She betrayed you.”

  “Hers was a sin of weakness, not one of malice. It tortures her, and I let it. That’s her punishment. And if one is to have a spy in one’s chambers, what better than one who is hard of hearing and a little slow? After I pass, you tell her I knew, and that I forgave her. But not until after I pass. I don’t want her weeping to be the last thing I hear.”

  Not for the first time, Kip wondered at the White. Both uncommonly gracious and uncommonly hard.

  “Wait, why would Andross knowing that Teia was here matter? She’s— Oh.”

  If the Broken Eye found out Teia had tried to foil the murder of the White, they’d know she was betraying them. They might figure it out anyway.

  The White said, “You have my permission to tell Kip everything, Teia. But I don’t release you from your mission.”

  “Where’s everyone else?” Kip asked. “It’s not right we should be the only ones here.”

  The White simply breathed for a few long moments, as if her previous speech had worn her out. “The Spectrum is meeting, appointing Zymun Prism-elect. All my friends? Off, away, obeying orders,” she said. “Dying is a task I can accomplish alone. Adrasteia, stop. That’s enough. If not this night, I’ll die tomorrow. They only snip a few days from my natural span, and I am not such a fool…” She got winded and couldn’t speak for a little bit. “Such a fool I cannot take certain advantages from knowing my own last day. Go now, go.”

  They turned and went to the door, but she said, “Kip, not … not you.”

  Teia pulled her hood closed and disappeared, and the White beckoned Kip closer. “Desk. Card. Take it. And one last puzzle for you, O blood of Guile: Not only Prisms fly.”

  Kip went to her desk and found the Nine Kings card held between panes of glass. The White, much younger: Unbreakable. He tucked it in a pocket.

  “Open the curtains,” the White said. “I would … look upon the light.”

  Kip drew the curtains all the way open. It was gray out, not quite dawn. “Orholam shine upon you, High Lady,” he said.

  She didn’t respond. The Blackguards, who’d overheard the last, came to stand at her side. Keeping one last watch. Tears were streaking down Gavin Greyling’s cheeks.

  Kip stepped out into the hall. He couldn’t mourn now. He pushed it off. Had to think.

  Almost dawn on Sun Day, and Zymun was going to be named Prism-elect? They’d do it at dawn, or even before, so he could perform the morning ceremonies. If Kip wanted to get out, he didn’t have much time.

  The squad was waiting for him. “Let’s go!” Kip shouted. They were ready. They ran for the lifts. High Luxiat Selene, coming to give last rites in her many-colored robes of office, stepped to the side as they pounded past her. They piled into the lift and set the counterweights. Made it, thank Orholam.

  Cruxer threw the lever, and they dropped—one level.

  The lift jerked to a stop so hard it nearly knocked them all off their feet.

  “What are you doing, Captain?” Ferkudi asked Cruxer.

  Cruxer said, “It wasn’t me.” He flipped the lever back and forth to show them.

  They were at the Spectrum’s level. Kip turned to see a smug Grinwoody. Apparently the lever in his hand was some kind of override. “Ah, hello, sirs,” he said. “Promachos Guile demands you come with me. Now.”

  His triumphant grin told Kip just how much trouble they were in.

  Chapter 90

  For one mad moment, Kip thought about beating the hell out of Grinwoody and making a run for it. It was, of course, a terrible plan, but that grossly grinning face made it so tempting.

  Instead, Kip and the squad followed Grinwoody to the Lightguard checkpoint, heart like a stone. There was no general Blackguard checkpoint here: their numbers were too depleted now. They were only stationed directly outside the council chamber, down the hall.

  But as they got closer to the four Lightguards, a young Lightguard officer stood up with difficulty from the chair where he’d been resting. He lifted himself with the help of a boar spear. The crossbar was designed to stop the penetration of the spear into a boar’s flesh so it couldn’t gore you, but he was using it as a crutch.

  Kip could feel the ripple of recognition pass through the squad, like wolves with their hackles rising.

  Aram. He had a splint around the knee that Cruxer had destroyed. In the year since he’d been crippled, the young man had obviously been sucking at the teat of bitterness, for his face was twisted more than his leg. But whatever else it had done to him, his injury hadn’t stunted his physical growth. Aram had filled out. His arms and shoulders were huge even as his crippled leg had withered, and Kip had no doubt that the young man was far more proficient with that boar spear than anyone would guess.

  There was a flash of something in Aram’s lidded eyes as the squad approached, hastily hidden. But Kip recognized it. All the hatred and resentment in the world—and Aram’s eyes held his share and more—couldn’t hide that emotion. Not from Kip. It was grief.

  It was being excluded from a club that you wanted to be part of more than anything. It was not-belonging.

  It was only in seeing that feeling so perfectly mirrored in Aram’s eyes that Kip realized the void of it in his own heart. When had that ache disappeared? Kip had been an outsider for all his life. The fat boy. The drunkard’s boy. The whore’s son. The Tyrean. The bastard. The unfairly favored. The boy who didn’t deserve to be in the Blackguard. For all his life, Kip had felt excluded.

  Aram was feeling that. He’d lost the Blackguard. Kip was going to lose it himself. How could he look at Aram and not feel compassion?

  Technical ability wasn’t what made a Blackguard, though it was part of it. The essence of a Blackguard was sacrifice. They lived and died for each other, and that, the unquestioned devotion of the whole corps, made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. A Blackguard could be told to go to his death, and he would, because he loved his fellows and he trusted that his commander wouldn’t waste him. Orders might come down that made no sense that you could see, but they did make sense. Mistakes happened, men and commanders failed, but not—in this one tiny, precious corner of the world—from malice or selfishness.
r />   That was a treasure beyond words, and it was what made the Blackguards the best in all the world. That was what Aram lacked. His selfishness was poison to the heart of the one most valuable thing the Blackguard had.

  But he couldn’t see it, and that wasn’t reason to hate him. It was reason to pity him.

  “Aram,” Kip said. He saw the insignia on the young man’s lapel. “Lieutenant.” Respectful, but not deferring.

  And the grief was gone. There was only hatred there, but Kip was unmoved by it, even as the squad bristled at Aram’s open sneer.

  Aram said, “Search them. No one may go armed with the Spectrum meeting on this level.”

  A Lightguard came forward to search and disarm Kip, and Kip was suddenly tired. They were really going to play this? Again?

  “Uh-uh,” he said. He pushed the Lightguard’s hand aside.

  With a voice equally tired, bored, and exasperated, Kip said, “I’m a full-spectrum polychrome. This is the best squad among the Blackguard initiates. We are weapons. There’s no such thing as disarming us. And we, for our part, are compelled as Blackguards not to let ourselves be disarmed within the Chromeria itself. It goes to the very heart of who we are. We are those who are trusted with weapons here. We make ourselves slaves to earn that trust. So what you’re asking is both pointless for you and impossible for us.” Kip said the words to the man who was approaching him, but they were for Aram, and more than that, for Grinwoody.

  “Grinwoody,” Kip said, still bored, not turning his head to look at the slave, and still deliberately using his name in order to offend. “Use that unctuous voice of yours and the authority my grandfather has so mysteriously granted you, and clear this rabble.”

  The sour look on Grinwoody’s face was worth a thousand nights in hell. He waved the Lightguards away, and together, the squad walked past.

  But then Grinwoody stopped before they got to the council chambers. He put a hand on Kip’s arm. “A moment, young master,” he said.

  Kip stopped, suspicious.

  “Let me tell you how this is going to go,” Grinwoody said. He didn’t wait for Kip to acquiesce. He kept talking. “Your grandfather will berate you and accuse you of something. You will protest loudly—shouting is good, but not for too long. We need a spectacle, not a fight. And then he will banish you.

  “You will then have one hour until the promachos publicly changes his mind and orders you brought in for questioning. Don’t be captured. The girl and a luxiat will meet you at red dock five, where her ship is anchored. Get the wedding taken care of before you leave the island. You understand? It must be done here, publicly, or the deal’s off.”

  “Breaker,” Cruxer said, worried, “what is this?”

  “It’s survival.”

  The squad said nothing. Kip didn’t look back. Blackguards got used to following those they thought were making mistakes or endangering themselves recklessly, and though the squad hadn’t yet taken final vows, they’d still seen the attitude modeled enough times that they could emulate it.

  “We go where you go,” Cruxer said. Anyone who didn’t know Cruxer as well as Kip did would have missed the sorrow in his tone. Dear Orholam, it was going to be hard to say goodbye. Maybe it was best this way, though. One farewell at the docks rather than slowly watching the void grow between them and Kip as their duties pulled them inexorably away.

  The first Blackguard at the door was Gill Greyling. He’d watched Kip’s interaction with the Lightguards, and he seemed immensely pleased. He gave Kip the kind of salute that was supposed to be reserved for senior officers, then said, “Oops,” unapologetically.

  “You’re supposed to go right in,” the other Blackguard said. Kip didn’t know him well. Parian named Kalif, if he remembered right.

  Kip thought they were headed for the Spectrum’s council chamber, but instead, this was the Spectrum’s audience chamber. The Blackguards opened the double doors, and Kip found himself staring at several hundred people from the side entrance, with many of them staring back.

  One of the High Luxiats was speaking at the front of the room. Everyone was dressed in their best attire for Sun Day, and all the High Luxiats except Selene were in attendance, in ceremonial robes of a particular color or of many. Some high nobles were seated, too, with sons and daughters at the front, in places of honor of some kind. The doors creaked loudly as they opened, and the High Luxiat seemed thrown off his sermon.

  From a seat on the dais, Andross Guile stood and hurried toward Kip. He kept his head down as if he were trying not to interrupt, but he moved fast enough that he drew every eye.

  As the luxiat began speaking again, Andross reached Kip and motioned furiously for him to go back out into the hall. Kip tried to back up, but with the whole squad and the Blackguards behind him, he didn’t get all the way out into the hall before Andross began. “How dare you show your face here?!” Andross hissed. “I heard what you’ve done!”

  “What are you talking about?” Kip demanded.

  “Is it that you’re guilty of so many things, you want me to tell you which one I found out about?” Andross said, voice rising. He kept his back carefully to the audience chamber, to maintain the illusion that he didn’t know everyone could overhear them.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Kip said, matching his grandfather in volume. “I haven’t done—”

  “You and your squad killed a man! We found him. We found witnesses!”

  “What man?” Kip asked.

  “In the Six Corners district.”

  Kip put a hand to his mouth. Suddenly this wasn’t a game. That was where Teia killed the man who’d been tracking them. He’d thought Andross was going to make something up out of a whole cloth, not convict them of something they really had done.

  “There was no evidence that the man was a spy. None!” Andross shouted now. The luxiat in the room behind him had stopped even trying to preach. “Orholam help you, Kip. At best you’re a vigilante, at worst, a murderer.”

  “I—”

  “What did you think? That I’d shield you because you’re my grandson? No. And I’ve heard what you’ve done with this squad of yours. I don’t know how you turned the best of the Blackguard recruits, but I won’t tolerate anyone making a private army on my watch. What is it you call yourselves? The Mighty?”

  Of course they called themselves no such thing. Kip’s head was spinning.

  “I didn’t … I wasn’t…” he started to protest.

  “Hold!” a voice shouted from the door at the back of the audience chamber. It was Commander Ironfist. It was like watching the axle rattle loose on a carriage. There was nothing Kip could do to stop it. There was no way the commander knew this was prearranged.

  The commander was sweating freely, his chest heaving as if he’d run leagues to get here. “Kip was under my authority at all times. High Lord Promachos, there was no—”

  “Yes!” Andross Guile interjected, cutting him off. A hint of a grin curled the side of his mouth but disappeared before he turned back toward the chamber, and Kip’s heart sank.

  He’d seen that look before. That look was the look Andross gave when Kip had made a mistake playing Nine Kings. It was the look of a child being given an unexpected gift, as if the world stunned him at times with its sheer stupidity. Andross hadn’t planned that Commander Ironfist be here, but he knew what to do now that he was.

  “Yes, Ironfist, he was under your command. And your negligence grieves me. You have served long and hard, and I am loath to hold your failures against you, Commander, but you have done your term of service honorably, if poorly in this last year. Commander Ironfist, you are hereby relieved of your command and your commission. You will retire with full honors and stipend, effective immediately.”

  Kip felt like he’d been hit in the face with a shovel. One part of him saw the art in the lies, the questions spawned by Andross’s words. People were suddenly wondering, in what ways had Commander Ironfist failed? Many of them knew that I
ronfist and Andross Guile hadn’t gotten along, but Andross’s apparent grief at having to relieve Ironfist of command, and the way he seemingly honored the man even as he kicked him out—his very grace in victory made it seem obvious that whatever the conflict had been, it had been Ironfist’s fault.

  Ironfist looked gutted. He seemed like he didn’t even know where to look, glancing from Andross Guile to Kip, even at Grinwoody.

  Kip wanted to throw up. He wanted to kill Andross Guile.

  “And you, Kip,” Andross said. He turned, as if suddenly aware of how public this had become. “Everyone, I’m terribly sorry you had to see this. Kip, I will not shield you because you are family. The evidence, though far from certain, is quite suggestive. Kip, you’re expelled from the Chromeria, expelled from the Blackguard, and exiled from the Jaspers. Effective immediately. If any of your Mighty go with you, they, too, are expelled and exiled. Begone, grandson.”

  “I—”

  “Begone! Before I change my mind! Out!” he roared.

  Kip trembled with rage. Not for himself, but that he’d let Ironfist get caught up in this. And suddenly, Gill Greyling and Kalif were very close behind him.

  To protect Andross Guile against him.

  No, no. Not like this.

  In a daze, Kip went out. The squad and even Commander Ironfist went out with him. The double doors closed, but before anyone could say anything, they opened once more, and Andross poked his head out. “Commander,” he said quietly. “I know how your Blackguards love you. If you lead a rebellion, I bet half would join you. So it’s your decision: is that what you want for either half of the Blackguard? Afterward, I’ll disband them. You’ll have ended your precious Blackguard.”

  Then Andross disappeared back into the room. The doors closed after him.

  Kip looked at Ironfist’s face, and was afraid. The huge warrior trembled with rage, his fists clenched hard at his sides. Kip never precisely forgot that Ironfist was huge and tall and perhaps the best fighter he would ever meet, but being reminded of it like this was something else altogether. He heard Ironfist breathing: in on a four count, hold for a four count, out for a four count, empty for a four count. It was the very calming technique he’d taught them to moderate the battle juice or to steady rage.