by Brent Weeks
Teia’s knees felt weak. She nodded. She had to get away.
“So now that we understand each other, tell me, have you seen anything worthwhile?”
Teia gave her report. Kip was fat, had few friends, spent most of his time in the library, apparently spending all his time reading about some game. He’d been summoned several times to speak with the Red, and had seemed distraught afterward. He thought the Red wanted to destroy him. The old man had taken away Kip’s right to go to practicum in order to make Kip seem inept when Gavin got back. Teia had seen Kip draft green and blue. He didn’t sleep well.
All that was fine. It was information Lady Crassos could learn through other avenues. But that wasn’t good enough, and Teia knew it.
Feeling sick to her stomach, Teia also told her mistress that Commander Ironfist had told her that there were two trainees he couldn’t let fail out of the Blackguard: Cruxer and Kip. She omitted herself.
That was obviously news to Aglaia. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. Is there… anything else?”
“I train with Kip, after midnight, in a special room low in the Prism’s Tower.” Adrasteia shrugged. “The commander wants him to be good enough to make it into the Blackguard by himself.”
Hold back what you can about Kip, too. Don’t tell her about the dagger he has hidden. Keep what you can of your soul.
“Good enough,” Aglaia said. “Anything else?”
Give everything else. A slave, not a hero. “I saw someone else using paryl when I was out on one of my special jobs.”
Aglaia’s eyebrows shot up, and she made Teia tell her everything about it.
“An assassination,” she said. “Never liked her anyway, but that someone would… hmm. I’ll have to see if she died. Worrying, though, either way.” She didn’t explain who she was talking about. Teia knew better than to ask.
Aglaia seemed to push the thought out of her mind and turned back to the task at hand. She smiled, and it actually seemed genuine. “You’ve pleased me greatly, girl. I’ll remember this. I know I’m a hard mistress, but if you perform well, you’ll be rewarded well. Today, two rewards. First, I’ll let you name one.”
It could be a test, a trap. A slave knew there were certain rewards you didn’t ask for. Asking too much made you seem lazy or ungrateful or greedy. But if your mistress were in a good mood, she might change your life on a whim—for the better. “Erase my father’s debt,” Teia said before she thought too much.
“How much does he owe?” Lady Crassos asked.
“Seven hundred danars.” It was two years’ wages for a laborer. Her father spent everything now simply paying the interest on it.
“Seven hundred danars? That is a substantial sum. How did your father run up such a massive sum? He a gambler?”
Teia ignored the patronizing tone. “He bought my sisters back.” He’d been crushed when he came back from a trade journey to find that his wife had taken up with another man, had borrowed vast sums to fund a lavish lifestyle, and lost everything he’d worked for twenty years to accumulate, including their house, furniture, jewels, and brewery. His wife had finally sold their three daughters to pay her debts. And then only part of the debts. All while he’d been gone.
“He bought them back. But not you.”
“I cost too much.” It was Teia’s fault. Her drafting had manifested after she’d been sold. If she hadn’t drafted, everything would be different. Her mother had only been furious that she had sold Teia too cheaply.
After everything, Kallikrates hadn’t even left his wife. Said she’d gone mad. Said it was his own fault that he’d married a woman who couldn’t bear a trader’s long absences.
“Do you know how much this bracelet cost me?” Aglaia asked. She held out a wrist, bangled with some ugly golden glittering thing.
“No, my lady.” Guessing too high would be as bad as guessing too low.
“Guess.” It was an order.
“Six, seven thousand danars?” Teia said. It couldn’t be worth more than five thousand. Her father would have gotten it for four.
Aglaia’s eyebrow rose for a moment. “Well done, little flower. I got it for five thousand six hundred, and I drove a hard bargain. I thought it would complement a necklace I have. It doesn’t.” Her expression made it clear that today was the last time she would ever wear it.
Teia said nothing. She knew better than to hope.
Aglaia said, “No, no, of course not. Seven hundred danars, for collecting snuff boxes and trinkets and a bit of information? That’s far too rich. I will keep it in mind, though. Something else…?”
“Training in paryl,” Teia said quickly. If she got in, the Blackguard would probably go to the expense of finding and hiring a private tutor for her. Otherwise, she’d have to wait until she was a gleam, or a third-year, when more specialized Chromeria training started. That was too long.
“Ah,” Aglaia said. “That might well be more expensive in the long run than erasing your father’s debts. But… it would make you more likely to get into the Blackguard, wouldn’t it? An investment.” She thought about it for a moment, while Teia’s heart pounded. “Yes. Done.” She smiled. “And an excellent request. Shows a good mind. For a slave. I want you to know, I’m quite pleased; if this weren’t our first meeting, I’d skip the beating. But I can’t have you thinking I’m soft. Strip down to your shift, girl. I like to keep one layer of cloth on so I don’t leave marks, but there’s no reason to give you more padding than necessary. Beatings can be so tiring in a stuffy little room.”
Teia stripped, and Aglaia Crassos carefully beat her horrendously from her calves to her shoulders, and then, when Teia thought she was finished, she beat the front of her body from her collarbones to her shins.
Sometimes Teia fantasized about not weeping through a beating, of being as hard and implacable as Commander Ironfist or Watch Captain Karris White Oak, but she wept freely. Proud slaves were stupid slaves. And it hurt too much anyway. Though she claimed dispassion, once Aglaia Crassos got going, sweating as she beat the girl, her face lit up with a glow that wasn’t wholly perspiration. A small, fierce joy lit up her eyes when she snapped the crop across Teia’s breasts one last time at the end.
Aglaia Crassos rang her little bell and Gaeros poked his head in the door immediately. Teia collapsed to the floor, every part of her aching. Gaeros carried in a platter with a goblet of chilled wine in it.
The foul hag took it and drank deeply. “Gaeros, help this one dress, and”—she rubbed the beads of perspiration from her upper lip—“summon my room slave, the tall one, Incaros. I find I’ve worked up an appetite.”
“He awaits you eagerly in the next room, Mistress.”
“Ah, see! Anticipating my needs!” She turned and put the crop against Gaeros’s groin. “If you were even a little bit handsome I might reward you for that.” She slapped the crop against his crotch, as if it were playfully, but it connected hard.
A small grunt escaped as the man turned to the side and held himself still for a long moment. His eyes were watery when he opened them. But Aglaia had already forgotten about him. She turned to Teia and stood over her. Aglaia said gently, “You’ll remember this, won’t you, Teia?”
“Y-yes, Mistress.”
“Gaeros, find out her favorite food and drink. We’ll serve them to her next time. She’s done well. Very well. Teia, I’ll beat you again next time. Slaves are naturally slow to understand and need firm reinforcement of basic lessons. But after that, this won’t have to happen again.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“And you swear to serve me with your whole heart, don’t you, girl?”
“Yes, Mistress,” Teia said fervently. There was no trace of guile in her.
Was she a good liar? Aglaia had asked. Teia was a slave. Of course she was a good liar.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Your second reward.” Aglaia Crassos rummaged through a little jewelry box. “You are to wear this at all times, understood?”
Lady Crassos handed her a slender, pretty gold necklace with a little vial dangling from it. Seeing the puzzled look in Teia’s eyes, Lady Crassos merely smiled broadly and left.
As Gaeros helped her dress, eliciting gasps and grunts and grinding teeth as cloth slid over inflamed skin, Teia heard the harpy noisily rutting next door, cries of passion not unlike pain. When Teia was all dressed and her tears dried, Gaeros gently took her tightly balled fist in his hand to take the necklace and put it on her.
With difficulty, Teia unclenched her fist and surrendered the vial. A vial of olive oil.
Chapter 43
Kip held a book open across one arm and rubbed his forehead, rubbed his eyes. He’d discovered a little trick to help his concentration. He was standing at the window, and now he closed the book, keeping a finger tucked in to hold his place. He looked left and right. No one was in sight. He turned the book over; its cover was bright blue, drafter’s blue.
Blue sluiced through him, starting at his eyes, and cleared away every obstruction to logic: weariness, emotion, even pain from sitting scrunched. Kip breathed out and let the blue go. He grabbed another book, on the fauna of old Ruthgar when it was called Green Forest. It was actually a pretty interesting book, but he’d grabbed it for its cover as well: drafter’s red. The primary colors—not in the sense artists used the term, but in the drafter’s sense, the colors that were closest to their luxin counterparts—were endlessly popular. Kip looked at the cover and drafted a bit of red. It blew air on the dying sparks of his passion for learning about the cards. He set the book down. Grabbed orange. A thin tendril of that helped him be more aware of how objects related. He wasn’t doing any of these colors perfectly, he knew. To be counted a drafter of a particular color, you had to be able to craft a stable block of its luxin. Kip couldn’t do that. He could draft only green and blue. The sub-red had been a fluke, just that once. He’d taken the test. He was a bichrome.
But what he could do was pretty darn useful. He opened his book again and kept reading.
Over the last two weeks, he felt like he’d made a lot of progress learning Nine Kings. Now he had a good sense of the basic strategies—it was, after all, only a game. There were whole reams of information he could simply ignore as well—strategies when playing more than one opponent, game variants played using fewer cards or more, ways to wager money, drafts from common piles. All unnecessary for him.
Then, at some point, he had a realization that he’d learned basic strategy, but in studying accounts of great games, he still didn’t understand why players wouldn’t play their best cards immediately—and with a whoosh like drafting fire, the metagame opened up. Counters that he’d figured were unimportant, perhaps vestigial from the ancient versions of the game, suddenly came into play. Strategies to thin the opponent’s deck. Theories as to how to balance play styles when addressing decks of certain colors. It became a game of mathematics, managing piles of numbers and playing odds. Playing against a certain deck in a certain situation, your opponent would have a one in twenty-seven chance of having the perfect card to stop you. If he played Counter-Sink now (and he was playing logically), you could infer that he didn’t have it.
He walked up to the librarian with the huge black halo of hair, Rea Siluz, and handed her back the basic strategy book she’d told him to memorize. “Metagame,” he said.
She grinned. She had beautiful, full lips. “That was quick.”
“Quick? That took me weeks!”
“The next step shouldn’t take you so long.” She handed him a lambskin-bound book. “Hang in there with this one. It’s a bit dry.”
Kip took the book. She’d said the last one was interesting. If that had been interesting and this was dry… But he forgot his complaint as soon as he thumbed open the book. “What’s this?” he asked.
The writing in the book was odd, blocky, legible, but unnaturally cramped. And unnaturally even. Every letter looked like every other letter, whether it was at the beginning of the word, the middle, or the end.
“It’s an Ilytian book. Not more than five years old.” She glowed, genuinely excited. “They’ve figured out how to copy books with a machine. Think of it! Apparently it’s hideously difficult to make the first copy, but after that, they can make hundreds of copies. Hundreds! In a few days! The Ilytian scribes are up in arms, afraid their craft will go extinct, but the goldsmiths and clockmakers are flocking to it. They say even tradesmen own books in Ilyta now.”
Strange. There was no personality to it. No human hand had inscribed these lines. It was lifeless, everything the same. No extra space after a difficult sentence to give a reader time to grapple with the implications. No space in the margins for notes or illuminations. No particular care taken on a memorable line or passage to highlight it for a tired reader. Only naked ink and the unfeeling stamp of some mechanical roller. Even the smell was different.
“I think I’m going to get bored even faster,” Kip said. “It makes a book so… tedious.”
“It’s going to change the world.”
Not to something better. “Can I ask something rude?” Kip asked.
“Generally when you preface a question that way, no, you shouldn’t,” Rea Siluz said.
Kip tried to figure out a more diplomatic way to ask if she was spying on him. He looked up, thinking. “Um, then… do lists of the books students are reading get passed on?”
“If librarians wish to keep their jobs, absolutely. Sometimes we neglect to write down all the titles, or miss things, however.”
“Ah. Can you miss that I’ve moved on to this volume?”
“Want someone to underestimate your skills, huh?” she asked.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to underestimate my skill at this point,” Kip said. “I’m hoping my skill takes a leap sometime soon and surprises everyone. Including myself.”
“If you want to take a leap, you have to start playing.”
Kip opened his hands, helpless.
“I’ll teach you,” she said. “At the end of my shift, I can stay late for an hour or two. I’ll bring decks.”
So now, a week later, he was waiting for Rea to come play against him as she had every day.
She came out and gestured Kip to follow her to one of the side rooms. “I’ve figured out your problem,” she said.
“I’m not smart enough for this game?” Kip asked.
She laughed. She had a nice laugh, and Kip was nicely infatuated with her. Orholam, was he fickle or what? But the women here had been a handful of heavenly beads nicer to him than the girls back home. He wondered if things had been unfairly bad before because he’d had the baggage of his mother back home—or if they were unfairly good now because he had the father he had. He couldn’t tell—and he never would. He was who he was, and nothing could change it, nothing could tell him how things would have been if his parents had been different, normal.
“I doubt it’s that, Kip. Every card has a story.”
“Oh no.”
“Every card is based on a real person, or a real legend, anyway. But a number of the cards you’ve described to me are archaic, pulled from use years ago. They’re sometimes known as the black cards, or the heresy cards. The odds of the entire game have shifted without those cards. Some cards can’t be countered in ways they easily could have when those cards were in play, and so forth. You can’t tell anyone you’ve been playing with those cards, Kip. Playing with heresy is a good way to get a visit from the Office of Doctrine. But I’ll tell you this: you won’t win against someone playing with black cards. The basics are still the same, but all the deep strategy books in the last two hundred years have been written around the holes that yanking those cards has created.”
“There’re no books with those cards in them?”
She hesitated. “Not… here.”
“Not here here, or not in the Chromeria?”
“The Chromeria p
rizes knowledge so highly that even horrid texts describing the rituals the Anatians used when they would pass infants through the flames haven’t been destroyed. Indeed, when they’ve gotten so old that they need to be copied or disintegrate to dust, we still copy them. Albeit with rotating teams of twenty scribes. Each scribe copies a single word, and then moves on to the next book and the next, so that the knowledge may be preserved without contaminating anyone fully. Not everything that goes into the dark libraries is similarly evil—much is simply political, but only the most trusted people are allowed beyond the cages.”
“Like who?” Kip asked.
“The Chief Librarian and her top assistants, of course. The Master of Scribes and his team. Some luxiats who’ve been given special dispensation by the White. Full drafters who have submitted applications for specific research are sometimes granted single books or are accompanied in there. Blackguards, and the Colors. And sometimes the Colors grant permission to certain drafters, but those have to be approved by the Chief Librarian, who answers to the White herself.”
“Blackguards?”
“They’re the most likely to have forbidden magic used against them as they protect the Prism or the White. And, unofficially, they’re also the ones who need to know what longstanding feuds there are, so they can prepare defenses against the right people.”
It was a light in darkness. A way Kip could kill about fifteen birds with one stone: he could learn the game, he could try to dig up dirt on Klytos Blue, and he could try to find out if his mother had simply been smoking too much haze or if there had been something to her accusations about Gavin. All it required was that he do what he’d already decided he had to do: get into the Blackguard. Easy. Ha.
“Blackguards being allowed in doesn’t include scrubs, does it?”
She chuckled. “No. Nice try.”
His immediate problem, though, was the games with his grandfather. And he knew, even though he’d been ignoring it because she was pretty and helpful, that he probably shouldn’t share anything at all with Rea Siluz.