by Brent Weeks
“No.”
“Oh hell.” If Kip had honestly wasted all the time he’d spent studying, he was going to find the nearest tall building and throw himself off.
“I jest,” she said. “It means you’re ready to start.”
“I feel a sudden, intense desire to throw a temper tantrum,” Kip said.
She squinted at him. “The cards are true, young Guile. And that’s why this game has been played by generations of fools and madmen and wise women and satraps. Take a moment and soak that up. The strengths and weaknesses on the cards are honest to the figures they depict. Not all-encompassing, of course—for a few numbers, a few lines, and a pretty picture can only tell so much—but not misleading. But that’s only the beginning of the greater truth, the greater gift that is Mirroring.” She walked over to the wall and grabbed a card. She sat on a stool and spun around twice like a little girl. “Come, look, and see. Taste of the light of Orholam.”
Superstitious drivel, or magical invocation, or efficacious prayer? Kip had no idea. The old woman seemed half mad. Maybe every word she was telling him was a lie or a delusion.
The card was, Kip guessed, an original—a young woman, dressed in leathers, buttons of turquoise, pale skin, flaming red hair piled atop her head, caged between black ironwood thorns. Green stained the skin of her left arm, which was down at her side, leaves coiling about it. Her right hand was behind her back, as if she might be concealing a dagger. She stood straight-backed, and the smirk on her face was imperious, ready for anything.
“This is your great-great-great-great-grandmother, Zee Oakenshield. In most ways, she is the founder of your house, though the Guile name comes from elsewhere.”
She was attractive, and there was nothing about her to remind Kip of himself—but that smirk was all Gavin Guile. It was like the artist had carried her expression over a century and dropped it on the man.
Instead of commenting on the startling similarity, and the obvious gift the artist must have had to have captured it so well, Kip said, “She doesn’t even have a shield.” Inane. Nicely done, Kip.
“She never carried a shield, oaken or otherwise. The name was for something else. But I needn’t tell you. You see the gems?”
Kip nodded. There were five tiny gems, framing the picture, one at each corner, one above her head.
“Draft a bit, any color, and then touch all those gems at the same time.” She pointed at a painting with broad bands of the drafting colors on one wall.
Kip stared at the blue. Blue was far less frightening than green. Within seconds, he felt the wash of cool rationality. Should he obey this woman? Well, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t learn anything. The only reason he’d come was to learn. Besides, what was she going to do with a card that she couldn’t do to him with one of her many guns?
With the blue in his fingertips, he touched the gems.
Nothing happened.
Well, that was a little disappointing.
“Push harder,” Janus Borig barked. “It needn’t bleed, but it must be near enough to call to your blood. You’ve got soft hands. It shouldn’t be hard.”
Soft hands? Kip grimaced, but obeyed, tapping the blue jewel hard, his other fingers loosely over their corresponding jewels.
Zee blinks to clear her eyes, peering into the dawn. Filtering through the smoke of two burning cities on either side of the Great River, the rising light is red. It’s disorienting, having his view cast this way and that, without his body moving, without any control.
There are enemy soldiers on both sides of the Great River. Kip can almost hear the whisper of thoughts attached to those men—who they are, what they do—but “enemy” is the only thing that drifts through to him.
She’s on the high ground, and her siege-drafters are already at work, ropes and cranks at the ready, waiting for the dawn to get enough light to do the rest of their work.
Zee turns to a hulking brute of a man with one eye. He looks at her, a frightening visage, but deferring. An officer? A subordinate, certainly. He holds a great bow, an arrow the size of a ship’s spar drawing back. Her mouth moves, but Kip hears nothing. He can only see.
The enemy is four hundred paces away, twenty paces downhill, downwind from Zee, to judge by the flapping of the standards. The Ruthgari army is jogging, keeping ranks. Some of Zee’s horsemen—most still in their teens—are already charging. She sees officers waving at them angrily, calling them back perhaps?—and then, defeated, the officers follow them.
Her line is tearing, some of the clansmen on foot following after the horsemen, spoiling the shots for her archers.
Once the foot soldiers charge, the archers would have to leave off shooting. Instead of a dozen volleys of a thousand arrows each, it would be six.
She shouts something, looking toward the siege-drafters, who have already drafted the great green luxin crossbeam and are filling the barrels of flammable red luxin to hurl at the approaching army.
They—and a dozen other siege-drafting teams—may get off two rounds.
She jumps up on her horse, the sudden movement sickening Kip, shouting something to—Small Bear, that’s his name!
Small Bear says nothing, adjusts his aim incrementally, and looses the huge arrow. A thousand archers follow his lead.
She grabs a torch and rides out in front of her men. Kip thinks she’s shouting. Perhaps all the men are shouting. She throws the torch in a high arc, and her men surge forward.
Her thirty mighty men surround her in seconds.
Something is shifting, sinking deeper—
A flaming barrel of red luxin smashes into the front lines of the Ruthgari, bursting and cutting a vertical flaming slash, crushing men and setting them alight. I draft green off the grasses that will soon run red. To my left, Young Bull and Griv Gazzin are drafting blue and green respectively, swatting arrows and firebombs out of the air, keeping me safe.
I draft a lance of green luxin and kick my stallion’s flanks.
“Enough.”
The sound reverberates oddly.
I don’t seem to notice. The taste of ashes heavy in the air is more noticeable by its sudden absence than it had been in its presence. When did she start tasting? Smelling? Then the smell of ash and sweat and horses—gone. The feel of the saddle between her knees, knuckles tight on the lance.
It goes dark.
Kip blinked, and found his hand held in the crone’s. She’d pulled his fingers off the gems of the card one at a time.
Breathless, Kip looked into her eyes. He could feel the blue luxin leaving him, draining into nothingness, abandoning him, leaving him empty, lifeless.
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “You heard something there, at the end? Smelled? Tasted?”
“A, a little.”
Her eyes lit. “They lied! Of course they lied. Of course. They’re Guiles. But why would he send you here alone? He must have known you’d be discovered for what you are. We must know. Stare at the ceiling.”
The ceiling, which Kip would have noticed earlier if it hadn’t been for the profusion of original cards, was a full spectrum, enameled and shining. “Do you want me to do something? Draft or—”
She took his hand. “Keep looking up is all.” She pressed his fingers onto a card, one at a time. She pushed his pinky down, hard. A whiff of tea leaves and tobacco washed over him. He was about to comment when he felt a bone-deep weariness settle over him. His body ached. Then, as if his ears had been unstoppered, he could hear the creaking of wood and the whooshing of wind, the slap of waves.
He pondered the exact words. It was a cool evening, and the scent of gunpowder clung to the ship and the men. Somewhere on the ship, a woman was weeping, over the dead, no doubt. His room was dark, lit by only a single candle. Outside, silver streaks of moonlight cut the night like a sword. He rolled the quill between his fingers.
His naked hand lay across the parchment, holding it in place. No secretary for this. This was treason. There was a name the missive was addressed t
o, but the hand obscured it—it ended “-os,” which meant it could be anyone Ruthgari, or one of thousands whose name was Ruthgari even if their blood no longer was.
Then Kip lost all awareness of himself.
“A more advantageous peace may be found on the opposite shore of war. Dagnu is—” I write, the scritching of my quill filling the little cabin until the last word, which is silent. Muted. Odd.
Then the cabin… dark. I feel—Kip feels—Kip felt dizzy. He was back, staring through his own eyes once more.
Janus Borig puffed on her pipe, looking angry. “At age fifteen? No.”
“What the—What the hell just happened?” Kip demanded, yanking his hand back.
“You didn’t tell me, or I could have made things easier for you.”
“Tell you what? This is my fault somehow?” Kip was scared, angry. Was he crazy? What had she done to him?
“You’re telling me you don’t know? The cards make their connection through light, Kip. The more colors you can draft, the truer your experience.”
“What happened to me?” Kip demanded.
“You saw more than you were supposed to. Let me leave it at that.”
“Was it real?”
“That is a more difficult question than you know.”
“Did she die?” Kip asked.
“Zee? Not in that battle, though she lost.”
“She was fighting against…” Kip hadn’t quite gotten it.
“Darien Guile. Fifteen years later she bought peace by having her daughter marry him. It was said that she wanted to marry him herself, but she was too old to bear children and she knew lasting peace could only be bought by binding the families together forever. There were rumors of an affair between Zee and Darien, but they weren’t true. Darien Guile respected Zee enormously and might have preferred to marry her, but they both knew how much blood might be spilled over one man’s broken oath and one woman’s folly. A lesson your family had to learn the hard way some time later.”
Kip didn’t know what she was talking about, but he assumed from how she said it that the war Zee and Darien had been fighting must have been started by something personal. “Was he a good man?” Kip asked.
“Darien? He was a Guile.”
“What was the second card?” Something about Dagnu. That was the old pagan god. Kip wondered how old that card had been.
“A mistake. I grabbed the closest real card, and I should have known better.”
Which was no answer at all. “These cards all do that?” Kip asked, looking at the wall with awe and fear.
“Only the originals.”
“Which ones are originals?” Kip asked.
“I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that many of the cards here are booby-trapped. If you try to take them off the wall, you’ll have some very nasty surprises in store. If you get them off the wall and try to draft their truth, you most likely won’t survive the hell they put your mind through.”
“I thought you wanted to help me,” Kip said.
“I do. I’m just letting you know that if you steal from me, you’ll be left a gibbering idiot. Even the real cards, used correctly, have dangers. Not all truths are beautiful. These cards can make a man delusional. Make him lose himself. They can teach… hideous things to those who wed not wisdom to power.” There was a bitterness in her tone, but before Kip could ask, she went on: “Regardless, a woman must needs protect herself. I don’t care about your father, except to make his card. I don’t care about you, except to make your card. This is what a Mirror does. It’s who I am. It is my mission from Orholam himself, and I will do it well. If you help me do it, I will be happy to help you. You’ve let me know what you can draft. That helps enormously, so I’ll give you this to start: if you play with the deck that Andross Guile gives you, you’ll always lose.”
Chapter 48
“Paryl is unique among the colors,” Teia’s tutor said. “And it is uniquely dangerous.”
Teia scowled. She thought that despite being the weakest and the worst color, at least paryl wouldn’t get you killed or drive you mad. Then she scowled again—because they were standing in one of the Blackguards’ training halls. It was dinner time, and there weren’t many scrubs in the hall. Mostly it was inductees from the classes ahead of Teia’s, but Cruxer was nearby, kicking his shins methodically up against a post. He’d told Teia once that it lightly broke the bones in the shin, and that the body responded by building them up ever tougher. He’d showed her his lumpy shins. It was impressive—and kind of gross. She thought it was the greatest thing she’d ever seen. But right now, he’d slowed his training, obviously eavesdropping.
“What’s dangerous about it?” Teia asked. Her private tutor, Marta Martaens, was more than fifty years old. Ancient for a drafter. Wavy dark hair gone platinum, olive skin, top front teeth missing.
“That you go blind or burn to death.”
Teia took a sharp breath. Oh, is that all?
“To see paryl, you have to dilate your pupils much, much more than most people can. You can do this consciously, yes?” Magister Martaens sucked at her thin upper lip.
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Do it. I need to see.”
It took Teia a moment. It was hard to relax your eyes as far as paryl demanded when you were tense. But then it came.
“Good,” Magister Martaens said. “Now, back to normal. I assume you’ve never seen your own eyes in a mirror when you’ve done that? No? Watch.”
The woman stared at Teia, and her eyes dilated unnaturally wide, the iris a tiny band of brown around a huge pupil.
Teia made a moue of appreciation.
“That’s to see sub-red,” the old drafter said. Then her pupils flared again, stretching the sclera itself, her entire eye going an eerie black, pushing the white to nothingness.
Teia flinched and shrank back.
The woman’s eyes went back to normal in a blink. “That’s what your eyes look like when you’re viewing paryl, Adrasteia. Our eyes themselves are different, the lenses far more malleable, blessed by Orholam to see differently. Can you see superviolet?”
“No. And I’m color-blind, red-green.” Best to get it out right away.
“Unfortunate.”
“Are you?”
“Color-blind? No, but it’s more common among us. We can see a vast spectrum of light, far more than other drafters. But that doesn’t necessarily overlap with what others see. My own mistress’s master Shayam Rassad was completely blind in the visible spectrum, but navigated perfectly with sub-red and paryl. But, dangers. First, the physical: if you dilate your eyes so much in bright light too often, you will go blind. Slowly, usually, but you need to take extreme care with mag torches and bright sunlight. Now, enough talk. Let’s see what you can do.”
So they began practicing, Magister Martaens asking Teia what she could see, drafting substances of her own, picking out sources distant and near, asking Teia to draft it herself. The paryl as Magister Martaens explained it was more like a gel than anything, albeit a gel that was lighter than air. It made good markers because the gel floated and frayed apart, constantly emitting paryl light.
“So you made the markers for my mistress,” Teia said. She was stupid not to have realized it earlier. Of course the woman had! There weren’t exactly hundreds of paryl drafters around.
The woman’s face went very still.
“How many of us are there?” Teia asked.
“Only two right now,” Magister Martaens said. She looked to either side as she spoke, glancing nervously over at Cruxer, who was still pretending to be working out, without moving her head. “You and me.”
“But that can’t be right,” Teia said. “I saw a man craft solid paryl and—”
Marta Martaens hissed—actually hissed. Teia froze up.
Magister Martaens smoothed her features and calmly walked toward the exit, beckoning Teia to join her. When they were out into the huge, bright underground cavern beneath the Chromeria,
she went around the corner of the building where they couldn’t be seen. When Teia joined her, she saw the woman was livid.
“I don’t know what you thought you saw,” Magister Martaens said, “but you are never to speak of it again. Do you understand?”
“I—I’m sorry, but no,” Teia said.
“You don’t need to understand, you need to be silent. Especially about such things.”
“No!” Teia said. “You’re my tutor. Teach me. I need to know everything if I’m to get into the Blackguard. You can’t hold back on me.”
“I can and I will. You’re my discipula; you will obey me.”
“Then I’ll take my questions to Commander Ironfist.”
The woman went gray. “I want you to think very carefully about what you’re considering, young lady.”
“Going to someone I trust, someone in authority over me, with a simple question, that’s what,” Teia said, getting angry.
“Tell me what you think you saw. Quietly.”
So Teia did.
Magister Martaens was shaking her head even before Teia was finished. “No. No. I’ve tried to make paryl solid a thousand times a thousand. It doesn’t work that way.”
“But what if it did?” Teia said.
“Yes, exactly,” Marta Martaens said.
Teia lifted her palms, more mystified than angry now. Maybe drafting paryl really did make you crazy.
Magister Martaens looked around, again, though there was no one to overhear them. “Think about what you’re suggesting: a color that’s invisible to nearly everyone, even every drafter—a color that could kill, without leaving a mark, without leaving any evidence, that looked like a natural death. Please use your tiny brain to think about how people would react to such magic.”
Teia licked her lips. They would react exactly as she had, with terror.
“Anytime someone dies mysteriously, it becomes the fault of a paryl drafter. Anytime some obese noble keels over from a burst heart, people whisper that it’s the work of his enemies—and every noble has enemies, and most of them are fat. Think first about what that does to nations, when any death could have been an assassination. Then think what that does to paryl drafters. When the Office of Doctrine sent out luxors to stamp out paryl drafters, they weren’t authorized solely or even mainly because the Spectrum thought we were heretics.”