The Black Prism

CHAPTER 50





Kip woke with a dead arm from a dream about his mother holding his head in her lap. It wasn’t a dream; it was half memory. He’d been young. His mother was running her fingers through his hair, her eyes red, swollen. Red eyes usually meant she’d been smoking haze, but this morning she didn’t smell of smoke or alcohol. I’m sorry, she said, I’m so sorry. I’ve quit. It’s going to be different from now on. I promise.

He cracked open one sleep-snot-encrusted eye and moaned. That’s nice, mother, can you just get off my arm? He rolled over. He’d slept on the ground? On a carpet? Oh! As the blood slowly flooded back into his arm, it started hurting. He rubbed it until feeling returned. Where was he? Oh, Liv’s room. It was barely dawn.

Sitting up, Kip saw a woman coming in the room. Maybe the opening door had woken him. Liv must have slept elsewhere. The covers of the bed weren’t even disturbed.

“Good morning, Kip,” the woman said. She was a dark woman, with heavy eyebrows, frizzy hair, and a flamboyant gold scarf around her neck. She was thick, hugely tall, with great heavy shoulders and a bold-patterned green dress draped over her like a sheet over a galleass. “It’s dawn, and time for your first lesson. I’m Mistress Helel.”

“You’re my magister?” Kip said, still rubbing his hurting arm.

“Oh yes.” She smiled, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes. “And you’ll remember today’s lesson for the rest of your life. Get up, Kip.”

Kip stood. She walked past him and opened a door to a small balcony outside Liv’s room.

“Come quickly,” she said. “You need to see this before the sun is fully over the horizon.”

Hair squashed, mouth full of cotton, breath foul, arm throbbing, Kip licked his dry lips and stepped past Mistress Helel. Her eyes were dark and intense—so dark that he couldn’t even tell what color of a drafter she was.

Weird. Here I’m supposed to see minute differentiations in colors undetectable to most people, and I couldn’t even see the color in her irises. He stepped onto the pure yellow luxin balcony. Aside from streaks of water or dirt, the entire thing was eerily clear.

Despite his experience yesterday learning that the yellow was one of the strongest materials known, Kip tested his weight on the balcony gingerly. It was, of course, solid. Due to the way the towers all leaned out, as if blossoming, if Kip fell from here, he’d smash on the rocks several hundred feet below, just shy of the water. It was even worse for the floors above them, which leaned even farther out. He gulped and tried to pay attention to the rising sun.

“We don’t have all day, Kip,” Mistress Helel said. There was something in her voice, a tension.

Kip turned as she stepped out onto the balcony with him. At first he thought she was tripping, because she lunged forward so suddenly. He moved toward her to catch her. If there was one thing good about being fat, it was that he could stop big weights.

But Mistress Helel extended both of her hands like battering rams. Kip’s move forward brought him between her arms. Her thumbs scratched across his chest and off both sides. She cursed as they crushed together in an awkward hug.

“I’ve got you,” Kip said. “Don’t worry, you’re not going to—”

The big woman stood to her full height, regaining her balance. She was much taller than Kip, and the move pressed big flat breasts onto either side of his face. Somehow his chin got caught in her dress’s gaping neckline as she stood and for a brief—but not nearly brief enough—moment, Kip’s face was fully engulfed in flabby cleavage.

“Gah!” Kip blurted.

Mistress Helel was already bending over, mercifully freeing her neckline of Kip’s chin, but then bending farther, her body pressing against his. After an experience that he was doubtless going to relive in dreams—and not the good kind—he sidled out of the way.

The woman’s big meaty hands slapped on Kip’s right and left legs. His move to the side made her left hand slip off his right leg, though. Then she lifted.

“What are you—” Kip stopped as soon as he saw her eyes.

Dead concentration, complete lack of emotion. She pushed forward hard into Kip, lifting. He put it all together far too slowly.

The intensity, the story, the lack of color in her eyes, the stumble that hadn’t been a stumble. It had been a lunge. The lack of embarrassment at Kip being pressed against her breasts—because you don’t let the touch of a little flesh deter you. Not when you’ve come to kill.

Kip’s hands slapped against the edge of the balcony behind him. With only one leg in her hands, Mistress Helel lifted sharply. She was so strong that Kip’s weight was no problem for her.

If he’d been a brave man, Kip would have fought her. If he’d been flexible, he would let her pick up the one leg while he stood on the other and beat her to a bloody pulp. Instead, Kip took the fatty’s way. He went limp, floppy, making all his weight dead weight, seeking the ground the way he’d done when Ram would try to show off by picking him up and throwing him on the ground. If Kip collapsed, Ram could never lift him, where if he held himself rigid, Ram could hold his weight easily.

Mistress Helel brought one hand off Kip’s left leg, seeking a grip anywhere on his round body. Kip wriggled like a fish, pushing off the balcony, trying to push himself back into the tower. She pinned him against the corner of the balcony with her own substantial weight and drew back her left hand to punch him.

But the floor called him, and without her strong arm to hold him, Kip answered. Her fist descended and landed a glancing blow, but Kip fell. She lost her hold and he went turtle, barely keeping a grip on his pant leg. Cursing, she tried to lift him by that alone.

His pants ripped, and then slipped off his waist. They tangled around his knees, but however his baggy pants hampered his movements, they did nothing to help the assassin lift him either. She cursed him and punched his leg, taking a wide stance to pound him. He yelped. Then she slugged him in the stomach, taking his breath away. She snarled. “Take your death like a man.”

Kip bit her ankle.

The assassin cried out and fell on top of him. She recovered enough to land knee-first on his chest. Then she angled her fall so she crushed and trapped him. Apparently Kip wasn’t the only one who knew how to use his weight to good advantage. She landed with her head toward his feet.

She trapped one of Kip’s legs in one iron hand. Then she punched his thigh. She caught it dead center. It was like being kicked by a horse. He screamed. Then she grabbed his other leg. No amount of thrashing could break her grip. It was hard to even breathe with her on top of him, her legs crushing his face. She pummeled his other leg, and it too went dead. She pushed herself up and punched him in the groin.

Stars flashed in front of Kip’s eyes. Any thought of counterattack fled. He just wanted to curl into a ball. Her weight shifted, crushing him again, and then she stood. She had one of his ankles in each of her hands, and she lifted him easily. She was going to toss him over the balcony, dear Orholam. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

Eyes squinted in pain, weakly thrashing, Kip saw a thin beam of superviolet luxin stick to the assassin’s head.

“Stop it! Drop him now!” a young woman screamed from inside the room. Liv?

The assassin snarled a curse and turned toward Liv just as a yellow luxin ball blasted from her hands, zipped along the superviolet line, and exploded in a blinding flash against the assassin’s face. Mistress Helel dropped Kip, lifting a hand to protect herself too late, and staggered backward.

She was so tall that the rail of the balcony caught her below the waist. She hit it hard and tottered. Her meaty hands slapped onto the rail as she went on tiptoe, feet seeking purchase. Kip, lying on the ground, slid a hand under her foot and lifted. Not hard—he was in so much pain he could barely move—but it was enough.

The assassin felt herself going over the edge and scrambled. She fell—and caught herself on the rail of the balcony. Through the clear yellow of the balcony, she swung face-to-face with Kip. Each balcony had a small gap for rainwater to sluice off so it wouldn’t fill with water, and the big woman’s face was barely a foot from Kip’s own.

Kip looked at her. He knew how this ended. Some skinny woman might be able to pull her weight up, but not a woman this size. Kip was strong—he could lift heavier things than Sanson or even Ram—but when you were really big, heaving your entire weight over a ledge was impossible. And this woman was much bigger than he was. Mistress Helel heaved, and for one terrifying moment Kip thought he was wrong. Her elbows bent and her body lifted. She swung one heavy leg to the side, trying to reach it high enough to reach the rain-gap in the balcony.

Then her strength gave out and she swung back to vertical. She was finished. Kip could see it in her eyes. “Light cannot be chained, Little Guile,” she said. “Anat blind you. Mot smite you to the tenth generation. Belphegor blight your sons. Atirat spit on your mother’s grave. Ferrilux corrupt your father’s—”

Kip punched her through the rain-gap. Her nose crunched in a spray of blood. She must have been expecting the blow, because she tried to snag his fist—but missed.

She fell, flailing all the way, screaming something, but Kip couldn’t make out the words. She slammed into a sharp boulder not five paces from the crashing waves of the Cerulean Sea, and her body actually burst asunder, a piece—a leg?—shearing off and flying to splash into the water as the rest of her crunched in one long bloody smudge.

It didn’t seem real. Part of Kip knew that could have been him, maybe should have been him, but he was suddenly aware of Liv standing just inside her apartments. “Kip, Kip, we killed her,” Liv was saying. Kip was more aware that his balls were aching and he was pretty much naked in front of the only girl he knew, and he was fat and gross and should cover himself immediately.

He’d barely hiked up his pants by the time Liv lurched to the balcony rail and vomited. Kip hated throwing up. He hated himself throwing up, and he hated other people throwing up. But worst, he discovered, as the wind blew across the yellow tower and carried mist through the rain-gap, Kip hated being thrown up on. Little misty wetness stuck to his face and in his open mouth.

He rolled over, spitting and coughing and slapping at his own face to wipe off puke-mist. He rolled to his feet, balls still aching, face scrunched.

“Oh no,” Liv said, her face gray and mortified, realizing she’d thrown up on him. She looked from him, to his crotch where his pants were torn, and then to the rocks so far below. She struggled for words and found none.

“You know, I’m glad things aren’t awkward between us,” Kip said. Did I really just say that? It was like part of him couldn’t help being totally inappropriate. He’d just killed someone, and he was so terrified and pained and embarrassed and mortified and thankful to be alive and he didn’t even know what all else, he couldn’t help himself.

Liv’s mouth twitched up for half a moment, and then she leaned back over the rail and vomited again.

Always something to say, never the right thing. Well done, Kip.