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 prizes 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.
“So I’ve been wasting my time,” Kip said.
“You can win, but you won’t win consistently, even if you play well. The odds you’d judge from are the wrong odds.” She shrugged.
“And I can’t find the real odds by playing because no one plays with the heretical cards Andross Guile has in his decks, and I can’t find out the real odds by studying because I’m not allowed into those libraries?”
“Pretty much.” She looked like she wanted to say more, though.
“Or?” Kip prompted.
“There’s someone who might help you, a woman named Borig.”
“Borig?” It had to be the ugliest name for a woman Kip had ever heard.
“She’s an artist. A little eccentric. Be respectful. The spies who check in on you are accustomed to you and me spending the next two hours playing in this room. If you leave by the back and take the stairs down a level, you can slip out without them seeing you. It’s important, Kip, for her sake as well as yours, that you not be followed or overheard. The Office of Doctrine is more academic now than it once was, but with the recent troubles, there’s been talk of appointing a few luxors. You don’t want to run afoul of people who are afraid. Not now.”
“Luxors?”
“Lights mandated to go into the darkness. Empowered to bring light by almost any means they deem necessary. There were… abuses. This White wouldn’t stand for them to be appointed again, but Orea Pullawr is not a young woman, Kip.”
It made Kip feel sick to his stomach. There were layers on layers of intrigue here, everywhere lurking under the surface. And any one of them could engulf him. “Where is she?” he asked.
Rea gave him directions, and he left immediately. Down the tower, across the bridge, into Big Jasper. He was walking through a narrow alley before he realized that sneaking away might be dangerous. Might be a setup. How stupid was he? Someone had tried to kill him once already. He didn’t know Rea Siluz’s loyalties, and she had both given him the problem (the existence of black cards) and the solution (visiting someone who might not exist, in a place far from safety).
He should go home right now. He should stop playing with Rea Siluz, and he should… What? Wait until he was a Blackguard? Ignore every summons from his grandfather? That wouldn’t work. The old man wouldn’t let Kip show him that kind of disrespect. Kip didn’t know what Andross Guile would do, but it would be bad. Very, very bad.
If only Gavin would come back. Gavin could protect him. Even though Kip had heard people say that Gavin was afraid of Andross Guile—that everyone was afraid of Andross Guile—it felt like Gavin could arrive and solve all of his problems in an instant. Kip could go back to being a child again.
A child tasked with destroying the Blue.
Orholam have mercy. Kip couldn’t count on anyone. He had to make the best of it. He had to go on.
It was late afternoon. The stars of this district had their light focused elsewhere. Here, the buildings were close, the shadows long. He looked over his shoulder.
Sure enough. A large, unkempt man was looming at the mouth of the alley. The man drew a knife from his belt. It was roughly the size of a sea demon.
Kip ran.
It was only twenty paces to the nearest lightwell. Kip skidded to a stop. He fumbled with his pocket, pulled out his spectacles as the big man charged after him. Put them on his face.
The big man pulled up short. Raised his hands. “Didn’t see you there, drafter, sir. Was just running, uh, home. No offense.”
Kip hadn’t even started drafting. In truth, he probably wouldn’t have had time to draft before the big man killed him.
But the man didn’t know that. He backed away, as if from a wild animal, then ran.
Just a thug. Just a thief. Nothing personal. No conspiracy. No assassination attempt.
And Kip hadn’t even thought of the fighting skills that Ironfist and Trainer Fisk had been beating into his skull. He looked down at his hands. His knuckles were chafed, fists bruised from constant use, and Kip had simply… forgotten it all. Hadn’t even occurred to him that he could fight.
He tucked his spectacles back in a pocket, and saw that the door in front of him was labeled: Janus Borig, Demiurgos.
He knocked and swore he saw dark-clad figures up several stories on either side of the alley bob out of nowhere quickly and disappear. He felt the weight of hidden eyes.
Jumpy, Kip. Jumpy.
An old woman opened the door. She was almost bald, and she was smoking a long pipe. Long nose, few teeth, a scattering of liver spots amid faded freckles. Her dress was besmirched with paint. She would have looked like a vagabond, but she wore a thick gold necklace that must have weighed a sev. She was wrinkly and ugly as afterbirth, but plainly vigorous, and there was such warmth in her features, Kip found himself grinning almost immediately.
“So. You’re the bastard,” she said. “Rea told me you’d come. Come in.”