Lightbringer 03 - The Broken Eye

by Brent Weeks

  Tahirith. A yellow. Had merely killed her husband who habitually beat her. It was a relief, after Zenana.

  Kyriaka Kyraeus. A blue from a noble family. Had joined Dazen’s rebels, and when they lost had bribed slavers to take all of her servants if only they would spare her. Had been looking for her slaves since to redeem them, but ran out of time.

  Loida. A red. Had participated in a small massacre in some Atashian village during the war. Didn’t, on the other hand, feel guilty for spraying red luxin into Garriston.

  Tsul. A sub-red. She confessed a thousand small cruelties, which she realized sprang from a life of hatred. She’d hated and envied multitudes, and though it had never reached any pinnacle of expression in violence or sabotage, she’d wasted all her years and talents. Said she’d sinned most against Orholam, for wasting the gift he’d given her, life.

  Sar-Rat Bibiana. A sub-red. She’d tried to go wight, and had been so heavily sedated that she couldn’t confess.

  Shala Smith. A red. Drunk and high on poppy. Couldn’t confess.

  Tasmituv. An orange. Lies, she confessed. Always lying and manipulating. Long ago, she’d confessed to a luxiat for cheating on her husband, but still felt guilt for that, too.

  Edna. A blue. Said she couldn’t speak her sins, they were so black. Not even to the Prism. No prodding would move her.

  Illi Patel. A yellow. Attacked Gavin. Had hidden how much she’d gone wight.

  Lemta. A red. Wight. Was bound to the kneeler when Gavin got there. Couldn’t speak.

  Meghighda. A blue. Wight. Was bound. Spoke, but couldn’t be understood.

  Tamayyurt. A superviolet. Too wounded from the war to speak, burn scars and seeping sores covering her body, but smiled at Gavin, fully aware, refusing the poppy, ready for release. Gavin had taken a full minute after that one, unable to go into the next room.

  Parvin. A red. A thief.

  Tamazzalt. A blue. Another with a litany of sins, but so outlandish Gavin suspected she was lying, ill in the head.

  Dulceana Havid. A young sub-red, and an Atashian-born Ruthgari noble. She’d cheated on her husband with a young noblewoman named Eirene Malargos. Information to be remembered, and the first time of the night Gavin had used his position for selfish ends.

  Tamment Tailor. A blue. Simply said, “Envy, lust, hatred, greed, sloth. You’ve got lots to do tonight, so let’s be efficient about this, shall we?”

  Tazêllayt. Blue. And Gavin discovered the real reason they’d anointed his body with oil: it made it easier to wipe your skin clean when someone coughed blood all over you. A quick rub at the washbasin that stood between each room, and a quick change of ceremonial clothes that the luxiats kept on hand, and he was on to the next room as if nothing had happened.

  Tinsin Khan …

  Tinsin Khan he could never remember. He’d even looked her up, afterward. Tinsin Khan, green, of the Floating City, Blood Forest, in service to the satrap’s steward. No memory of her. Something had broken in him when the luxiats had washed the blood from his face and put him in new garments, as if it were commonplace. Had broken his very memory, of which he was so proud.

  And now, though he could call up their colors and stories and sins and attitudes if he tried, he saw each one of the drafters differently; he pushed them back, away. They became only a name and a sin to be shrived.

  Illi Alexander. Gossip.

  Loida Moss. Poisoner.

  Tinsin. Rebellious.

  Tahlia. Envy.

  Bell Sparrow. Seductress.

  Li-Li Solaens. Wight.

  Xenia Delaen. Wight.

  Myla Loros. Wight.

  Pelagia Breeze. Spy.

  Meghida Talor. Hatred.

  Tahirith Khan. Greed.

  Edna Wood. Sloth.

  Tasmituv. Lust. Was it possible for a woman dying a virgin to have lust be her principal sin? Yes, Gavin learned.

  But he soon settled back into the torpor. Jaleh Smith. Incitement to murder.

  Nairi Many Waters. Lust.

  Lemta. Hatred.

  But then even the sins were starting to sound the same. ‘My husband never understood me,’ ‘If only I’d had as much as my neighbor,’ ‘It wasn’t fair that…’ Gavin could paint on a face of full attention, empathy, the same stock phrases, the same words in the same prayers. He could sound so sincere, but he heard his own voice as from down a tunnel. Even with his excellent memory, the penitents became only a name and a single detail. As if it weren’t worth the space to hold a sin for each, unless it was a really good one.

  Titrit. A fatty.

  A part of him was horrified at himself. A fatty? No, she’d been … a blue. A pious and earnest woman. Fearful but resolute. Quavering voice that made her fat little jowls shake, and utterly … utterly boring.

  Alé Aribar. Tried to seduce him to escape. Wasn’t even close to attractive enough to make it tempting.

  Dianthe Knoll. Perfect golden hair.

  Titaia Cox. Odd warts, all over. Washed his hands twice afterwards.

  Hêbê Ali. Claimed a hundred affairs. Ugly as sin.

  Melite Melaens. Big hands. Big, big hands.

  Agata Mason. How did she get any work done with breasts that big?

  Leilah Tree. The grimacer.

  Nurit Hex. Birthmark on her face.

  Beulah Blue. No eyebrows.

  Livnah Smith. Buck teeth.

  Naamiy. Kept clearing her throat. Orholam’s balls, would she never stop clearing her throat?

  Ora Orestes. Seemed nice. Gray hair. Looked like a grandmother.

  Penina Duraens. A coward.

  Minu. A drunk.

  Ercilia. Wight.

  Gilberta Gonzala. Cursed more than any soldier or sailor he’d ever known.

  Neva. So skinny she must have some eating illness.

  Xenia. Ugly.

  Sar-Ra Hesh. Deserter.

  Bili Oak. Stumpy.

  Khordad Ali. Gorgeous, with a flat affect. Smelled of shit constantly due to what had been done to her when she’d been captured in the war.

  Titaia Brown. Farmer.

  Elpida. Smelled of fresh sex.

  Dianthe … something. Weeper.

  Hagnes. Weeper.

  Hêbê Brown. Chatterer.

  Podarge. Odd name.

  Parvin Nyssani. Gavin twisted his wrist when the knife hit a rib.

  Ada Gil. Made a funny little ‘eep’ when he stabbed her.

  Livnah Elo. Wet herself copiously as she died. Dammit, they were supposed to take them to the toilets a few minutes beforehand to avoid that.

  Naamiy Patel. Vomited blood.

  Ora Jon. Attacked, badly.

  Yiska. Rambler.

  Ameretet Ali. Amazing beauty. Tried to seduce him. Gavin actually thought about it until he realized she was simply afraid, and that she would do anything for a few more minutes of life. Even cheat on her husband as her last act, instead of going to Orholam clean.

  Ihsan. Mediocre drafter, mediocre looks, mediocre sins.

  Ercilia. Died proudly.

  Evi Black. Nice name?

  Dulcina Dulceana. He didn’t want to remember Dulcina, but he couldn’t forget her. By the time he got to her, he’d been killing for almost nine hours. The drafter in the room was standing, leaning at ease against the kneeler. She was only perhaps sixteen years old. A dark-haired beauty with halos stretched to bursting with red and orange and yellow and green. She smiled at him, a full and innocent smile, neither seductive nor afraid, simply happy to see him. He was instantly smitten.

  “Greetings, daughter. May the light always shine upon you. Dulcina, if you would like to—”

  “Shh,” she said, touching her lips with a finger. “I’ve already confessed.”

  “Then would you like me to lead us in some prayers or songs?”

  She shook her head. “My High Lord Prism, you’ve been doing Orholam’s work all day, and will do so all night and through the morrow. Let me give you a gift. The only gift I have. The gift of my five
minutes. You may speak or we can be silent. You can Free me first if you prefer solitude, or at the end if you prefer company. As you will.”

  He didn’t understand. There had to be some angle, some advantage. It was all she had. It was her last five minutes, whereas to him it would just be another grain in a full hourglass.

  There was no angle. There was no deceit in her open eyes. He stared at her for ten seconds, thirty. And then he was furious for no reason he could understand.

  And then he broke.

  And he wept.

  And she held him. And they wept together.

  And after five minutes, the accursed bell jingled. And he stood. And he begged her forgiveness. And he kissed her lips.

  And he slew her.

  And with her died his faith in Orholam. It had survived war and abandonment and massacres and deceit, but it could not survive the holiest night of the year.

  It was midnight. He had killed one hundred drafters.

  Three hundred and twenty-seven to go.

  Thirty hours later, Gavin killed the last man just before the sun rose. And he went to his chambers, and for the first time since he’d brought hell to earth, he drafted black luxin.

  Chapter 25

  Kip took the lift down to head out to the Blackguards’ training yard, but when he got to the ground floor, he couldn’t force himself to get out. He was overwhelmed with people, with having just faced down his grandfather. He was trembling.

  He’d figured out in his weeks coming back to the Chromeria that with both Kip and Gavin being lost to the waves, the Red wasn’t going to let the blame for it land on his own shoulders. Nor would he be deprived of the services of his favorite slave, Grinwoody. That meant whatever story he’d invented blamed Kip.

  Knowing he would have to answer for the crime he had tried to prevent, Kip had prepared as well as he could, charting a course whereby he might find some rapprochement with the man who’d probably accused him of murder and treason.

  When he got off the boat, he’d asked the first person he’d seen what had happened to Gavin.

  Regardless, going into that meeting should have been the prelude to imprisonment and execution. Kip still wasn’t sure why it hadn’t been. Part of what he’d been betting on was that Andross was a wight. And he wasn’t. Not anymore.

  Andross still wore his hood. Still wore his dark spectacles, but Kip had known, instantly. There was something different about his voice, and he hadn’t been wearing gloves.

  Kip’s best card had suddenly disappeared. He’d planned to threaten to reveal that. If nothing else, before they took him away to prison, he could yank back Andross Guile’s hood to show the man for what he was.

  In the chamber, Kip hadn’t had a moment to think about the further implications: a man had gone wight, and was now a wight no longer? Impossible.

  Kip had merely spoken, weaving lies with a facility he didn’t know he had, so befuddled and intrigued by the puzzle that he’d forgotten to be befuddled and overwhelmed by addressing the entire Spectrum.

  And it had worked. Somehow.

  There had been a little spark of joy dancing at the corner of Andross Guile’s mouth. Surprise, but then pleasure. Like he enjoyed playing against a worthy opponent. Maybe that was why he’d let Kip off the hook, simply so they could keep playing.

  Kip felt suddenly ill. He was alive because of Andross Guile’s mercy? No, not that. He was alive because Andross longed for entertainment. There. That was more in line with the old horror. That made sense.

  But now, suddenly, the people he should most want to see—his Blackguard compatriots—he couldn’t bear to see, and he couldn’t have even said why. He took the lift down, and down. He got off at the level where the Prism had his private training room. Kip had lost the key Commander Ironfist gave him long ago, but the door had a superviolet panel next to it. Kip had never really noticed them before—they were flat black, and only a few thumbs wide. He’d dismissed them, not realizing what they were, but he realized they were made of the same stuff as the Prism’s room controls.

  After gathering some superviolet, Kip extended it into the panel. Ah, there was another lock inside, so that the door could be locked against superviolets as well, but it wasn’t locked now. Kip pressed superviolet in, and the mundane lock popped open. He went inside.

  The silence was a balm. He wrapped his hands in long strips of cloth the way Ironfist had taught him. The old widow Coreen had given him clothes, and while they weren’t exactly good for exercise, Kip knew that they would be replaced soon with Blackguard garb and a Chromeria discipulus’s clothes, so he set to work on the heavy bag.

  He started slow. Seven to ten minutes, Ironfist said, to warm up your fists and joints to the shock of hitting. Kip bent his wrist on an errant punch. He grumbled. He’d done the wrappings wrong. But instead of untying the whole mess and trying again, he drafted a green luxin brace around his wrist. Then he went ahead and made a full glove out of it. He matched it on the other hand.

  Much better. He punched the bag lightly for the seven minutes, his fists warming, the pain somehow welcome, the loss of thinking, thinking, thinking a relief.

  He moved over to the stretch bag, a smaller target that when hit snapped back toward you, building reflexes. After he got used to its movement, he looked beyond it, using the periphery of his vision to react. Then he went to the chin-up bar, and found he could do three now. Three! It seemed both an impossible achievement and pathetic at the same time. Three. Then back to the heavy bag.

  By some accident, he turned on the lights on the bag. It lit up sections to tell him his next target: right kidney, gut, left jaw. With each punch, the bag reacted to how hard Kip hit it by blossoming in color from his punches. Light touches lit the bag blue. Kip’s hardest kicks reached up to orange.

  It wasn’t long before he was wheezing at the effort of trying to get the bag to turn red.

  He braced his gloved hands on his knees. He was hitting the damned thing as hard as he could.

  No, he was hitting as hard as he could muscularly. Magically, he should be able to hit it harder.

  But he didn’t want to shoot his little green bouncy balls of doom across the room. If he could add his will to his muscles with magical stuff he threw, why couldn’t he add his will to his muscles?

  He remembered the wights in Garriston, leapfrogging from roof to roof, shooting luxin downward as they jumped, using the back kick to extend their jumps. It was the same concept that worked for Gavin’s skimmers and the sea chariots. But both of those interacted more externally. They didn’t have to, did they?

  Kip drafted a shinguard, then kicked off his shoes. This next part was going to hurt. It always did. He began kicking the heavy bag to warm up for it. He’d been shown how to put power into kicks a dozen times, but it hadn’t settled into body knowledge until today somehow. Maybe losing some weight had helped. He swung both arms in a guard to the left, letting his body stretch, his left foot turning until it pointed backward, hips opening, then jerked his arms back in, the torsion providing power as his right leg came up and pounded the side of the bag and set it swinging. That bag weighed two sevens. Not bad. He repeated it, not quite as successfully, from the left.

  Enough warm-up. He filled himself with green luxin, then stabbed a bit of it through the skin at the back of his right heel. He winced, cut it wider.

  Here goes nothing. He stood with his right foot back, twisted, snapped, and as his right foot came up, he shot green luxin out of it.

  The sudden transfer of weight from his body into the air, but this time not opposing his body but aiding it, threw Kip’s foot forward at tremendous speed. He kicked the bag so hard that he lost traction on his left foot and fell heavily on his side.

  Laughter burst out from the door.

  Kip popped to his feet in an instant, mortified. It was half a dozen members of his Blackguard class, led by Cruxer, who was grinning big. If it was possible, it seemed like the young inductees had changed in the w
eeks Kip hadn’t seen them. Cruxer was bulking up, his tall, lean frame looking more muscular by the day. His eyes, though, looked five years older, either from the death of the girl he’d loved, Lucia, or from being in the Battle of Ru. Affable Big Leo’s arms of banded iron looked even bigger. Gross Goss wasn’t picking his nose, but he was itching it with a big thumb. Tiny Daelos didn’t look any bigger, but he was beginning to look reedy and not just skinny and small. Ben-hadad still had spectacles with flip-down lenses, but he’d reworked them. These didn’t look thrown together with string and glue; they looked a masterwork, a perfect complement to the burning bright intelligence in his eyes. Only Ferkudi looked the same, the craggy-nosed dope. Actually, that was deeply reassuring.

  “Good thing Breaker fights better than he … uh, kicks,” Ferkudi said. “Kicking is part of fighting, though, isn’t it? Ah, that’s a real flesh protuberance.”

  The kids laughed.

  “Shut up, you nunks,” Cruxer said good-naturedly. He led as naturally as the first-place Blackguard in the class should. He bowed his head to Kip. “Godslayer.” He delivered it flat, so it could have been teasing or not. Or knowing Cruxer, he meant those who wished to take it as teasing to be able to do so, but he really meant it.

  Son of a … Kip thought that nickname had died when he nearly had on the ship. “Crux. Wh—what are you doing here?”

  “In the Prism’s practice room, you mean? They got so many recruits for the war training out in the yards, we Blackguards have been pushed into storage rooms and side rooms everywhere half the time. Teia somehow got us permission to use this one when the yards are full. I was going to cut her from the squad before that. She’s not so good, but after she got us this place—”

  “Hey,” Teia said. Somehow she’d lifted a blue luxin dagger from Ferkudi and was now pressing the point to Cruxer’s kidney, smiling sweetly.

  Cruxer grinned. “The insubordination around here.”

  “I thought you’d—I thought you’d think I was a traitor,” Kip said. That was it, that was why he hadn’t been able to bear going out to them. These were the only people in his life who had made him feel like he belonged, and he thought they would have looked at him as an outsider, a traitor.