by Brent Weeks
The limping Lightguard’s leg folded, and he fell. He cursed as he hit the floor.
The drunkard Arrad let go of the latch to see what had happened, and Teia pushed the door gently so it swung open slowly as if he’d pushed it a bit. The Lightguard started laughing at his friend.
“Here you were worried about me. You’re the one who looks drunk! That dodgy knee again?” he asked.
But Teia didn’t wait to hear any more. She disappeared into the room.
The room was some kind of parlor, with a hallway opposite where Teia had come in, heading toward another wing of the house, and another door vaguely in the right direction.
Teia put her eye to the keyhole. In the room beyond was a staging area for the slaves to bring up the food from the kitchens below and put it in order for presentation in the dining room that must be farther in. It was almost dinnertime. That room was full of slaves, all moving quickly to and fro: the quick pace of a smoothly run household, but almost literally running. Impossible to get through there.
From the hall Teia had escaped, she heard Grinwoody, raising his voice from the top of the stairs, summoning the Lightguards.
She went back into the hall as they disappeared upstairs and made her way—finally—back to the door where the promachos had gone. It was closed.
For one heartbeat, she thought of going back around, through the slaves’ area. She was quick, agile, small, and fucking invisible.
Then she heard Murder Sharp’s voice, and her guts turned to water. “Kidnapping’s a two-man job,” he said.
Kidnapping?
“Use Adrasteia. It will be a good test of her loyalty.”
“I’m not worried about her loyalty. It’s her upper-body strength I’m concerned about. If the mark gets difficult, I have to use the blackjack and carry her.”
Teia couldn’t even take pleasure in the thought that she’d truly fooled Murder Sharp. Instead, her mind was spinning: ‘Her’? Who were they planning to kidnap?
“Is she coming back?” Murder asked. “From wherever you take her?”
“You don’t need to know,” Andross said.
“I need to know whether she can see my face when I grab her. If you’re going to let her go afterward, it makes the job that much harder. People tend to remember me. My good looks and all.”
A hesitation. Then, finally, Andross said, “No, she won’t be coming back. Do whatever you must to bring her to me. I need her uninjured. I’ll give you a few days to ready your plans. Use whom you will. If it’s not Adrasteia, make sure whoever you use is disposable. And dispose of him.”
Teia put her eye to the keyhole and saw a vision out of nightmare. Murder Sharp was wearing his cloak, but hadn’t laced up the mask. With his body invisible, his head seemed to float in the air, his eyes dilated full paryl black, the whites pushed to oblivion. But as disconcerting as Teia still found his eyes, the effect was heightened a hundredfold by his wide grin. Murder Sharp had swapped out his dentures of perfect white teeth for a set made up entirely of human canines. Thirty-two dogteeth, perfectly fit together, in Murder’s deliberately wide grin.
“Gladly,” Murder said. He passed his tongue not so much over his lips as over his teeth, seeming to savor the touch. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water, and let himself shimmer back into visibility, his eyes narrowing to human dimensions.
“Now, about that matter at the Chromeria,” Andross said. His voice was all business, unmoved by the horror in front of him. Not pretending to be unafraid, Teia thought, but actually unafraid. This was his world, and he was master of it and all the beasts within. The pure confidence struck fear into Teia.
Can only kill you once, the logical part of her said, but these people were so far beyond her that the rationality was thin as an eggshell. If Andross Guile caught her, she would be less than a slave. He would turn her into an animal.
“It’s done,” Murder said. “She doesn’t know and never will. Trick I made up myself. Bits of paryl all around her heart. She feels tired, and simply … dies.”
Some words that Teia couldn’t hear, then “—the most delicate of all luxin?”
“Don’t matter. If they break up, she strokes out and dies anyway.”
“But…” Some words Teia couldn’t hear followed. “…by morning? You’re certain?”
“Probably dead already.”
Who are they talking about? Who does Andross Guile want dead?
But her thoughts were interrupted by their footsteps. She glanced through the keyhole, and saw they were walking toward her door.
She retreated to the steps, and then went up them as quickly as she could, pressing hard on the handrail to take her weight. With her eyes stuck to the door, she almost forgot to skip the creaky steps, and stumbled. She rolled onto the hardwood floor at the top of the steps, and quickly threw the cloak over her exposed legs.
She tried to free slack in the cloak so it would drape over all of her, but she was sitting on it, and the hands she put down to lift her butt also landed on the cloak. She shifted, exposing her hands—and realized she was covering herself with a visible cloak. She’d stopped drafting paryl.
For a moment, she was so frightened, she almost yelped. In her panic, she locked up and couldn’t draft at all.
There were doors every direction from the top of the stairs. If anyone came—
Teia rolled to her feet despite the voluminous cloak, and drafted paryl. Her chest heaved. Orholam’s beard, a moment of inattention could mean death. Panic, T? You’re better than that. Knock it off.
She looked down the stairs where Promachos Guile was escorting Murder Sharp to the door.
She was careful to look in quick glances so as to hide her eyes, but then realized that the cloak wouldn’t hide her from paryl vision.
In fact, she wasn’t sure that she could hide from paryl vision ever, even if she mastered the cloak.
Teia ducked out of sight and took a deep, quiet breath.
No wonder the mist walkers had been stingy with teaching others, and with seeking out others with the gift. Everyone you taught became more than a rival. It would mean deliberately creating threats to yourself, in a world where a true mist walker had few.
With the faint tinkling of the bell hung over the lintel, the front door opened and closed without the men saying any farewell. Not the type, Teia supposed. Then Andross Guile came up the steps. Teia guessed which way he was going, and was right for once. He passed by without so much as a glance her way.
What was she doing here? What had started as a lark had a very real chance of getting her killed. And for what? Because she was curious to see Kip’s brother? He would surely be coming to the Chromeria eventually. Why not wait?
Good question to ask myself a while ago, but now I’m here.
I didn’t come to see Kip’s brother; I came to see what Andross Guile is planning, and there’s no way I’m going to leave before I do.
Andross walked down a hallway, up another set of stairs, and into another sitting room. This kind of space within a single house on an island where everyone lived cheek by jowl and rents were ruinous seemed obscene. One old man lived here, one. Actually, he didn’t even live here. He barely visited. And yet he had this staff, in addition to the slaves who maintained his apartments at the Chromeria—and his wife’s empty apartments there. What other dead person got to keep apartments in the Chromeria, where space was perpetually tight?
Teia thought that she was going to have to decide if she was going to follow Andross into a room to eavesdrop again, or if she was content catching bits and pieces in the hallway, but it wasn’t much of a decision. As she rounded the last corner, she saw that the Lightguards from before were stationed at the door, and Grinwoody was scuttling about like a cockroach.
“Grandfather,” a young man said. He was astonishingly handsome, as one might expect of the son of Gavin and Karris Guile. He had Atashian caramel skin, with strong brows and an aquiline nose, and wore a fine gray tunic with slas
hes of color to match the many colors in his light blue eyes.
She knew him! He was the one who tried to kill her in the fort on Ruic Head. Tripped her, knocked her sprawling, took her pistol, and then ordered his men to kill her. This, this was Kip’s brother?
The young man didn’t simply bow; he prostrated himself on the floor before the promachos.
I’m going to hate myself for this.
But Teia couldn’t bear to miss this conversation. Holding the cloak tight around her legs and looking down, she slipped between the big Lightguards and into the solar.
Andross Guile stood silently staring at his grandson. He didn’t seem impressed. “Up,” he said.
Zymun stood. “I, uh, I lost the coin you sent me, the pirates, you understand. But I can draw it from memory. I’m a deft hand with a pen. Penmanship, art, luxin designs, I excel at them all. And of course I know the phrase you told me to say when we met: ‘Of red cunning, the youngest son, shall cleave father and father and father and son.’”
“You don’t carry much family resemblance,” Andross said.
“And Kip does?” Zymun shot back instantly. “He’s darker than Gavin!”
Teia could see that Andross Guile didn’t much like being addressed as an equal. “How much do you know of Guile family history?” Andross asked.
“I know we rule,” the young man said.
“You know we rule?” Andross said, mocking. “And you presume to correct me?”
“Not a correction, my lord, simply standing up for myself. I thought you would appreciate—”
“I would appreciate the respect I deserve. You grovel in one heartbeat and ‘correct’ me the next?”
Zymun looked aghast. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, my lord. I know but little of the family history. The—folk—who raised me were not keen on teaching Guile history. I stand to learn.” He bowed his head, and if Teia weren’t already disposed to hate him, she would have believed him chastened.
“Hmm,” Andross Guile said. He said nothing for a long time. It stretched to an uncomfortably long time. Grinwoody stood still as a statue. Andross drank his liquor slowly, and Zymun finally squirmed, but didn’t say anything.
Finally, Andross said, “Well then, we shall begin your education, and perhaps at the end have a little test, to see if you have the Guile mind. If you fail, you’re useless to me, even if you are what you say. A stupid Guile is no Guile at all.”
Teia’s heart soared, while Zymun nodded with feigned confidence over fear.
Andross said, “During the Blood War, some prominent families began arranging marriages with an eye to war instead of to political alliances. The Guiles were the first of these. My great-great-great-grandmother Ataea was from a small noble family that supplied half of the horses for the chariot races in Ruthgar and Blood Forest, and almost all the champions. Galatius Guile was a drunk who was bent on wagering away the family fortune at those races. She rescued his fortune by telling him which horses to bet, and soon stole his heart. She convinced him that marrying down—to marry her—would be the bravest act of his cowardly life. It turned out to also be the smartest one. She, like many, despaired of the Blood War ever truly ending, so she brought the lessons of horse breeding to the Guile house. She was a savage but shrewd judge of character, and she kept a ledger book of genealogy. Her husband, like every other noble she met or could learn about, got a single line: ‘Galatius Guile: drunk, gambler, a bit dimwitted, blue eyes, no drafting, inspires loyalty in family and beyond.’ Later in her life, her journals got more extensive, noting skin tone, musculature, bravery, height, and relative fertility. It helped, of course, that she herself had eighteen children and lived to be a hundred and five years old. She arranged marriages that defied politics, bringing in the blood of the brilliant but impoverished, the hale but unconnected. Where other families fought over who would marry the beautiful or the rich, thus driving up the cost of acquiring those matches, she instead believed that having smart warrior-drafters would result in riches and power both—in the long term. She even birthed several bastards of her own from the great men of her day, and clearly noted the fathers in her book, with no apparent shame.
“In that first generation, she was either very, very good; very, very lucky; or both, because almost every child born was a drafter. That she was similarly lucky with several other attributes wouldn’t become clear for a few more generations. Which pleased her. After all, if other families are becoming smarter and more magical, too, where’s your relative advantage over them? In fact, no one would have even known the logic behind her scheme if she hadn’t infuriated one of her grandsons by refusing to let him marry a girl he loved. He rebelled and ran off to a Blood Forest family that gladly took his secrets, and later, when Ataea refused to pay his ransom, his life.”
“Nice people,” Zymun said.
But the sarcasm hit a wall. For a few moments, Teia almost took hope in how much Andross Guile seemed to dislike Zymun. Then she realized he didn’t much like anyone. Or maybe he’d just been so powerful for so long that he never bothered to conceal it when someone displeased him.
He was the opposite of a slave, and yet his constant truths were no more winsome than a slave’s constant lying smiles.
“No one has kept that book as well as Ataea Guile did, and war has intervened again and again, killing men and women before they could contribute their children to this family. Bastards have been brought in, and their patrimony concealed. But in eight generations of faithful record-keeping—and sometimes nine and ten and twelve, for Ataea researched the family before her time back as far as she could—the Guiles have learned a few things about what’s heritable, what’s highly heritable, and what seems to be a dice roll. Of course, I don’t believe in dice, but I understand that there are systems whose workings I don’t understand. A lesson you might do well to learn.”
Zymun looked appropriately chastened. “Yes, grandfather,” he said.
“Grandfather? Haven’t connected it yet, have you? All this I’ve just said, what does it mean?”
“My lord?” Zymun asked, and Teia could tell that he hadn’t been paying attention at all. Who takes their first interview with Andross Guile, with their entire fate in his hands, and doesn’t pay attention to the first thing he says?
“Do you think me stupid, boy?” Andross asked.
“Of course not,” Zymun said breezily, but it sounded like a lie. Who spoke so fearlessly to Andross Guile?
Andross Guile slapped Zymun across the face, hard.
Zymun’s fists balled and his whole arm tightened. Somehow, Grinwoody went from standing off to the side with a serving tray to being right there, serving tray vanished, ready to intervene.
“One of the things we’ve tried hard to breed out with every generation,” Andross Guile said. “Impulsivity. Those who can’t control themselves are always failures. I see this is a weakness for you. Expect it to be tested again. Seems endemic with the Guile blood, but the best of us translate it to boldness, nimbleness, readiness to seize an opportunity. The rest simply chase the first thing to come along, and lose interest before they run it down and capture it.
“The point is that I have a very good idea what traits are Guile traits, and what traits seem random. Blue eyes with dark skin? Very rare among most peoples. Not rare in my family. There’s a lot of Parian blood in the Guile line. My brother was darker than Kip. Our mother was Parian, as was my grandmother. I was thought to be oddly light-skinned. If there is one of my grandsons whom I suspect might not be a Guile, it’s not Kip.”
“Kip? The bastard?”
“I’ve declared Kip legitimate. Kip does what he’s told.”
In what world does Kip do what he’s told?
But lie though it might be, now, for the first time, Zymun seemed truly aware that his position was tenuous. It was as if he’d made the cornerstone of his identity that he was, secretly, a Guile, that he had all seven satrapies waiting for him, that he was destined. And now his own grandfa
ther was threatening that?
But Kip had told Teia about his own interactions with Andross Guile, so she saw what was happening. Andross hated his new grandson’s arrogance, so he was doing to him exactly what he’d done to Kip, pretended that belonging to the Guiles was something that had to be earned.
It was patently ridiculous to Teia. The Guiles had no children. To whom would the old man give all this wealth? He’d gone on and on about genealogy, but he’d failed to produce a large enough crop of his own to give him the luxury of being picky. There remained only Kip and Zymun. Gavin was gone, probably never to return, and even if he did, where did a marriage to Karris fit into Andross’s book? The threat had to be hollow.
But Zymun didn’t know that.
“You little moron,” Andross said. “You had the Blinder’s Knife, and you used it to try to kill my son? You think you can play the Color Prince? Maybe. You think you can play me? You have no idea.”
“Grandfather, I was trapped. The Color Prince was there and you were so far away. Disobedience would have meant—I failed on purpose.”
“Learn to lie better.”
“I thought you and my father were at odds—”
“You had no way to know how I felt about Gavin. You were ingratiating yourself with the Color Prince.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know exactly what you meant. You were on a barge, with Gavin. All you had to do was come back to Little Jasper and bring me the knife. If you’d done so, tomorrow I would have made you Prism.”
“I swear I’ll never disobey again. I’ll do anything you ask. Everything—”
“You think I’m punishing you? I haven’t even begun to punish you. This isn’t my punishment. This is reality’s punishment. I can’t make you the Prism tomorrow. We need the Knife for that, and … other things that you don’t need to know about. Yet. Your incompetence may cost us—it may cost you everything. Had you either killed Gavin or joined him—either way!—if you had brought me the Blinder’s Knife, your own future, not to mention this family’s, not to mention all of the Seven Satrapies’, would be assured.