by Brent Weeks
And easy or hard, Kip didn’t have any of the skills that would have saved him. This was what losing one game of Nine Kings had cost him—his grandfather had forbidden Kip to attend practica.
Kip was trying to intuit what others had studied for generations. Well? Am I a genius of magic, or not?
Wait! Why am I messing about thinking about sextants and compasses and waterskins? I should be making a skimmer. He’d seen it done. He’d even helped propel one.
But a failure with a complicated device like the skimmer would leave him in the middle of the sea, with no way to get out. Kip could float, but it wasn’t like he was going to drift to Big Jasper, and if he tried Gavin’s jetting trick to swim, he’d break the halo before he got halfway there.
I can draft all these colors. It’s as if I’ve got a toolbox full of every imaginable tool, and I’m too stupid to use them.
Too ignorant, perhaps, a kinder voice answered him.
It was true. You wouldn’t blame a savage for the fact that he can’t read.
But you wouldn’t trust him with reading you letters, either.
The light began to fade, and Kip turned his mind to different problems. He found a clean area of the beach, just at the edge, where the palm trees gave him shelter. He took off his water pack. Staring at the darkening sky, he gathered enough blue to draft a blue luxin box with a single hole in the top, and sealed it. Then, standing on the beach facing the sinking sun, he gathered as much red as he could, patiently, slowly. The passions of red flooded through him, but he ignored them and simply filled the blue box. He filled the box full with the version of red luxin called pyrejelly.
He hadn’t been thinking clearly, and by the time the box was full there wasn’t enough heat coming from the sun to give Kip sub-red. He’d need to light his fire manually. It took him half an hour in the fading light to find a rock that looked like flint.
He banged rocks together for another half hour. Nothing sparked. He wanted to scream. He hitched his pants up and sat, rubbing his face. He tightened his belt, and saw that he was past the last, tightest hole. Not six months ago, he’d been at the loosest hole on the belt, praying he didn’t get any fatter because he didn’t know where he’d get the money or the leather for a new belt. All the rest of his clothing had been replaced at the Chromeria, but it had seemed wasteful to get rid of his belt. Besides, his mother had given it to him, during one of her rare sober spells.
Kip pulled the belt off. One of the flints had a sharp point that he could use to scratch out a new hole.
He looked at the buckle. The metal buckle. If he could punch himself in the stupid, he would knock it to Sun Day. Kip scratched the buckle against the flint he’d found, and wonder of wonders, it sparked. He lit the pyrejelly with no problem. It burned nicely. Kip sat and pulled his water pack to himself as the stars came out. Maybe some water would take the edge off his hunger.
The green luxin pack was sealed. Kip hadn’t drafted any way to open it. If it had been light out, he could have drafted more green and simply opened the green luxin and re-drafted it shut. Instead, he had to treat it as a purely physical object.
He wanted to cry. Or scream. Or throw a fit. Instead, eventually, Kip dug a hole in a weak part of the water bag with the sharp flint. Holding the pack over his head, he was able to drink from the warm stream of water until he filled himself.
Kip’s lamp guttered as the pyrejelly burned below the level of the hole. With no wick to pull the jelly up to the air, the fire starved and went out. Kip looked at it like it had personally betrayed him. He could smash the blue lamp holding the jelly, of course. He’d not made it very thick. But then the pyrejelly would burn off in perhaps a half an hour. If Kip had his spectacles, he could use that firelight to—he didn’t. Those were back on the ship. He’d not been wearing the lens holster the night Gavin had almost been killed.
He took that dagger for me. Kip had thought that Gavin liked him, approved of him like you approve of a well-trained pet. A sane man might risk danger to save his dog, but only an idiot would die for a dog, right? Gavin Guile was no idiot. He knew his worth in the scheme of things, and things couldn’t have been going better for him—he’d just married Karris, just turned a decisive defeat at the hands of the Color Prince into a narrow victory. Kip had seen it in his eyes, as Kip had revealed Andross was a red wight and attacked him. Gavin had known. Known about his father, for one. He’d shown no surprise. He’d been keeping that card in his hand, to play at the right time. And Kip had shouted it out to the world—Kip the Lip, saying exactly what he thought, speaking without thinking, endangering plans he couldn’t even fathom.
But Gavin had also known—in that moment, Kip had seen it—as they scrambled, four men, fighting over two blades, that Kip didn’t have the leverage to stop Andross and Grinwoody from burying the knife in his chest. What Kip hadn’t seen then, but knew now, was that with how their hands were interlaced, the only direction Gavin could pull the blade that wouldn’t be blocked was toward himself. He’d done it on purpose. He hadn’t stabbed himself, of course—he wasn’t suicidal—but once the blade’s direction had changed, Grinwoody and Andross had pushed hard instantly, not knowing, or not being able to stop, or not caring.
Why would Gavin save me, knowing the cost was his own life?
Gavin gave his life for me. The Prism himself, the best Prism in centuries, maybe ever. What did that mean? What did that say about Kip’s worth?
The thought was too big. The emotions welling up behind it too frightening. Kip was that lost kid whose mother had forgotten him in a closet full of rats. He wasn’t…
A tear dropped from his cheek and hit his protruding stomach. Where had that come from?
He rubbed the tears away with a grubby paw, bear once more.
And what the hell had happened with that knife anyway? The Blinder’s Knife, Andross Guile had called it. A knife that didn’t kill Gavin, but grew inside him instead. And how did my mother get such a thing?
That was better, safer, cerebral. Kip could think about that. But not, it turned out, for long. He was exhausted. He hadn’t drafted a pallet to sleep on, a blanket—could you make a blanket out of luxin?—or any kind of shirt. He hadn’t prepped any of the mundane bedding that might have made his sleep more comfortable, either. He broke the top of the blue luxin lamp and scraped a spark into it.
My father loves me. Of all men, Gavin Guile thinks I’m worth saving.
The luxin lit with a whoosh, and Kip felt waves of warmth beating back the night’s cold. The fire would not last long, but Kip figured he’d be asleep by then.
He was right. No sooner had his bare shoulder touched the sand than he began to dream of beasts and gods.
Chapter 13
~The Ex-Priest~
“War is always an excuse for the monstrous,” Auria tells me. We’ve climbed high enough we can’t see the raiders’ torches anymore. The light filtering through the fog on the headland is weak, but rising.
“Anyone who kills Angari is doing Orholam’s work,” I say.
“Darjan, all are his children, even the disobedient, and what you’re planning is forbidden,” Auria says. Her dark curls are matted with blood, her face blanched from its usual mahogany—from the bad light, I hope, and not from blood loss. I know it isn’t fear. Auria has never been afraid in her life. There are a hundred good reasons why I should listen to her. Karris Shadowblinder herself—Lucidonius’s own widow and heir—put Auria over me in our training. She’s older than me. Wiser, too.
But I’m stronger.
“I hate waiting for the light,” I say. I have a pair of Lucidonius’s marvelous spectacles, crafted by his own hand. Since he’s passed, you’d think they’re holy relics with how everyone treats them. Well made, though, anyone would admit. And utterly revolutionary. It hadn’t been that no one had thought of melting metal ores into molten glass for their color, it was that they couldn’t get the fires hot enough, couldn’t get the ores pure enough. Lucidonius had solved
that, too, showing himself to be a mundane genius as well as a magical one. He’d been infuriating that way, but those lenses had changed everything, for drafters everywhere. A lens grinder, their mighty Lucidonius. In addition to everything else. Changing our lives in a thousand ways. Drawing us along behind him like leaves in a gale.
And leaving a terrible mess when the storm passed.
“As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation,” I intone. Lucidonius preached that, and became powerful, more powerful than the pagan priests and prophets. Pagan priests like me. I begin drafting.
I was a kaptan of the aħdar qassis gwardjan. Lucidonius’s words had somehow changed my heart, but I still wonder if they ever changed my mind. Or maybe it was the other way around. His words were enough to make me give up my comfort, my position, my place, my prestige, but now as I look down toward my new home, where doubtless the streets run red with the blood of my new neighbors and only friends, I think perhaps Orholam didn’t change me enough.
Every color is from Orholam, Lucidonius had said, holding a prism above his head as he preached peace and brotherhood between colors and countries. It had made sense to many, but perhaps especially to those like me, who can draw more than one color. In my land, my mastery of green had always been praised, but my use of blue condemned by my brother qassisin. Even though it made me a better gwardjan.
Maybe none of it made sense. Maybe Lucidonius was merely more right than those who’d come before him. Maybe what I’m about to do isn’t a sin against Orholam, that odd desert god who lives in the sky and everywhere, invisibly, rather than walking the earth like a proper god. Maybe it is. He’ll have to forgive me, for though I am no longer an aħdar qassis gwardjan, I cannot stop being a gwardjan. It is who I am. Who Orholam made me, if Lucidonius spake true.
I draw on the light, and my green jinnīyah is there, familiar to me as my dead wives’ faces—my beloved wives, forced into the orgiasts’ flames to expiate the shame and crime of my apostasy.
“I’ve missed you,” Aeshma whispers along my skin, her touch caresses.
I’ve missed her, too. Of course I have. But she knows that.
I expect her to be angry, haughty, to punish me for turning my back on her. But she’s more canny than that. First she’ll get her hooks into me. Later, she’ll punish. Nor does she go to my libido, once so potent, now seemingly dead since my ’Annaiah and Siana burned. Instead, she waits. Perhaps she sees from my face that the only pleasure I seek is the pleasure of battle, of red vengeance. Perhaps even after all this time she feels me directly.
“I would have made you the next Atirat,” she says, mournfully. She puts her hand on my wrist as I start to pour luxin forth from my skin there. “You were to be a god.”
“The daemon’s in your eyes,” Auria says. “Do you see her true, or do you see how she wants you to see?”
I remember when Lucidonius bent the prism toward me as my jinnīyah stood in front of my eyes, shouting blasphemies in my ears. The sudden wash of other colors had shown me what the priests of the other colors saw when they looked at her. In every other color, Aeshma was a horror. No wonder the other qassisin kuluri warred with us, called us daemon-worshippers. And then Lucidonius had flipped a mirror out, and in that full-spectrum light, I’d seen that even the green was a thin mask.
Aeshma was no beauty. She was all disease and ugliness.
I’d shattered the prism, shattered the mirror, swearing Lucidonius had ensorcelled it, that he’d tricked me, shown me lies. But I was wrong. Later, I’d done the same trick when I found other djinn foolish enough to manifest themselves in their priests’ eyes. The prism we used was a mundane prism, the mirror plain silver and glass. Eventually the Two Hundred had learned that we could expose them. They came up with elaborate lies to those they snared to explain why they no longer would appear at all—blamed it on the stain Lucidonius had brought to the world. Truth was, they didn’t want to be so easily unmasked.
Aeshma says nothing more. I know she was one of the foremost of the Two Hundred, nearly one of the Nine. A new Atirat is not born solely of one man’s conquering all human contenders. His partner jinnīyah must conquer all of her rivals as well.
The armor wraps around my body. I hold open only points at each joint. It’s not as efficient or flexible or reactive as how I had once done it—with every pore, every sweat gland, every hair a point of contact. Back then, I’d let my jinnīyah control the armor, shifting it, reacting to dangers I couldn’t even see, her immortal will complementing my mortal will. The two of us had been one in a way I couldn’t share even with my wives.
I draw on blue, looking above the frames of my green spectacles at the lightening sky. Blue is safe, for me. I never bound my will to blue’s. To me, it is only a tool, albeit one that cools my passions. My jinnīyah would never let me draft much blue. She was too jealous. I’d thought it was simply her nature, but now I see that she needed me all to herself if she was to win her fights with the other djinn. An Atirat who was not a pure green? Impossible.
As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation.
Funny how Lucidonius put that in the present tense, though telling a creation story. Not, Pride was the first sin. It made the thing applicable to us, as much as to the First Light. Good trick.
“My heart is yours, Darjan, but I cannot save you if you don’t let me help,” Aeshma says. Her voice is so like my dead ’Annaiah’s that I know she’s stolen even that. Clever, clever wench.
“You can’t listen to what she says, Darjan,” Auria says in the mundane world, voice weakening. “You know she lies.”
I know.
“Show me I can trust you,” I say aloud. I hope Auria thinks I’m speaking to her; I hope my jinnīyah thinks I’m speaking to her.
The light is good now. I start running toward the village. Another color might sneak in, hoping to find the raiders asleep, exhausted from a long night of murder and worse. That isn’t the way of green. My jinnīyah sings battle rage and bloodlust, and I know that she knows me too well.
Rage is not only red’s. I draft enough blue to make sharp edges for the thorn swords that sprout from my hands. My legs are sheathed in luxin, protecting my knees, adding springiness to each step, adding the power of my will to my movement, allowing me to jump farther than any mortal, to land safely, to run faster than a charging grizzly. I am become a beast.
I see the dead: a young woman, Luzia Martaenus, lying on her side with her head cracked like an egg, her baby-swollen belly run through half a dozen times. Her younger sister is dead, cut down closer to town. They’d tried to escape together. Ruy Garos lies facing town, his pitchfork lying in the sticky pool of his blood. Perhaps he’d tried to cover Luzia’s escape. He’d always loved that girl, though she’d married the town drunk instead.
Usually, the Angari raiders treated the people of Atan’s Town like a crop. Weed out the men who can fight, cut off the thumb of the right hand of the young men so they can still work, still breed, and take the prettiest women for slaves and concubines. Then the Angari would come back years later, long enough that the people could have built up a little wealth, but not long enough that they could build up enough strength to give the raiders much trouble. Of course, the raiders killed those who irritated them, too. Sometimes they killed for sport. Sometimes they maimed for fun. But this… this was something else. This was pure punishment, a massacre.
Everyone is dead. I see little Gonzalo, the farrier’s simpleton son. He’s been impaled on a pike, sodomized, the point of the pike sticking out of his gaping mouth up at the sky.
I howl, waking the whole goddam camp, and my Aeshma comes back over me, putrid and beautiful, a diseased whore. She is as ugly as what I plan to do, and my soul is a small price to pay for vengeance. It makes me monstrous. I am become a beast. I am become a god. Vengeance is mine.
Chapter 14
The galleys collided with a tremendous shock that sent half the slaves tumbling backward over thei
r benches. A slave screamed as the manacle on his wrist tore his arm out of its socket. The Bitter Cob sank in the waves, having hit below the other galley’s center, then it lifted both ships and began to slide along the opposing galley’s side.
The other galley’s oars, fouled and crossed and yanked from their rowers’ hands, snapped like kindling as the Bitter Cob scraped along her hull. Falconets discharged from the main decks of both ships, and muskets punctuated screams of rage and screams of fear and screams of pain.
Heaving himself to his feet on the overhead oar, Gavin thought his part in the battle was done, but the Angari did things differently.
“Up!” Strap shouted. She had a splinter of wood thicker than Gavin’s thumb all the way through one shoulder. She didn’t even seem to notice. Orholam’s beard, she was fierce. “Man the oars! Knock those—”
A roar and an explosion of timber cut her off. The woman disappeared in sudden sharp light as the enemy’s cannon blasted a hole in the deck, followed instantly by a thick billow of black smoke, choking everything with sulfur and sunlight diffused with smoke. The sound deafened Gavin. He was only aware of the oar moving in his hands.
Blinking, gasping, coughing on burning fumes, he helped his oarmates, only slowly figuring out what they were doing. They stabbed the oar out repeatedly, Fukkelot guiding it, Orholam giving the lift, Gavin mostly interfering.
Through the smoke, not five paces away from them across the waves, he saw the bobbing forms of sailors on the other galley, trying to right their cannons from the collision. Loaded cannons. Aimed straight for the slaves’ benches. Gavin’s fellow slaves—at least those who’d fought before and weren’t injured—were using their oars to keep the sailors from lighting the cannons, to keep them from spewing death through the Bitter Cob.