Chapter 34
Kip didn’t have time to go to the restricted library immediately, and Karris still hadn’t contacted him, so he headed to his next lecture. The magister was Tawenza Goldeneyes. She was ancient for a drafter, perhaps sixty, and with a ferocious reputation. They said she only took three discipulae a year—yellow superchromats, all. Kip, of course, would be joining the class after it had been meeting for months.
He headed for the yellow tower, crossing through the elevated walk with only a single gulp at the heights, and arrived minutes later at the door of a small lecture hall. He paused at the closed door. There was a sign on it. “No Men Allowed.” He stopped. Scowled.
Kip Guile, kills gods and kings, afraid to knock on a door.
Totally different things. This is like walking into a women’s privy.
He looked down at his burn-scarred left hand that was so quick to curl into a fist. C’mon, fist.
He knocked, a firm but gentle triple tap.
The door opened before he rapped for the third time.
“What are you doing?” an older woman with golden eyes and luminous skin asked him. It wasn’t much of a guess who she was.
“Greetings, Magister Goldeneyes, I saw the sign—”
“But didn’t read it? Can’t read? Begone.” She swung the door closed.
Kip stuck his foot in without thinking. The door hit his shoe and rebounded open. Magister Goldeneyes already had her back turned, and she stiffened at the sound.
The two young women beyond her in the room, seated, necks craned to see Kip, looked suddenly aghast.
“Your pardon,” Kip said. “I’m your new discipulus, Kip. I figured the sign was a mistake. Surely it means ‘superchromats only.’”
“And?” she asked, turning. She looked at him like he was an insect.
Kip paused, not sure what she was doing. He said, “I’m a superchromat.”
“A superchromat boy is like a dog that can bark ‘I love you.’ It’s a novelty, not a precedent.” She slammed the door.
Kip took it. Just when he’d been feeling like he was Little Lord Guile Gets His Way. In the scheme of things, he probably was way past deserving it. Besides, it let him go to a forbidden library before Andross Guile could figure out some way to screw him out of it.
He realized he was blocking the door and a homely Abornean discipula of about twenty with faint yellow halos was trying to get past. He moved. As she slipped inside, she smiled apologetically and said, “Some things the Lightbringer alone will set aright.”
She closed the door behind her.
In minutes, Kip was back in the Prism’s Tower, approaching one of the rooms that Quentin had told him about. There was a librarian sitting in a chair in front of the door, reading. He looked excited to actually see someone. “Oh, greetings!” he said. He pulled a key out of a pocket and extended his hand.
Kip handed the man his red parchment.
“Kip Guile?” the librarian asked. He could obviously read, so Kip wasn’t sure how to parse the deeper question in the voice.
“That’s right.”
“You were there.” The librarian licked his lips. “Is he alive? Truly? They say he is, but that’s what they would say, isn’t it? To make us keep hope until Sun Day, wouldn’t they? Is the Prism really alive?”
“I swear it,” Kip said. “I helped pull him out of the water. He was breathing. It’d take more than a few pirates to put an end to Gavin Guile.”
The librarian nodded, heartened, his whole mien getting lighter. “That’s right, that’s right. After all he’s done.” The librarian scowled down at the red parchment and said, “Thank you, and I wish I could let you in for giving me that news alone. But I’m sorry, sir. New rules. Your grandfather has decreed that only those with his personally written permission will be allowed access to this special section.”
“What?” Did he even have the authority to do that?
The librarian said, “Just came down this morning, not two hours ago.”
Two hours ago. Before Kip had even come up with his brilliant plan to get Ironfist’s signature. Kip didn’t know whether to feel better because this meant that his grandfather’s spies weren’t that good, or to feel worse because his grandfather had foiled Kip’s plan before Kip had even come up with it.
Little Lord Gets His Way, huh?
It took the wind from his sails. He only ended up going to one lecture. It was engineering, and the lecture covered angles of incidence: mirror armor quality and the refraction of luxin. The class easily had the best demonstrations, with armorers and war drafters standing up and talking about why this quality of mirror armor would perform against a missile of blue luxin at this angle, but not that one, and how keeping the armor clean was one of the biggest problems, dirt making them less reflective.
Some Mirrormen—usually either the elite infantry of any satrapy or simply the richest—took to wearing very thin cotton coverings over their armor so that they would constantly be buffing their armor to a high shine, either shedding it as they went into battle or keeping it on throughout. It was less impressive, one armorer said, but there was no reason not to let the luxin weapons attacking you do the work of cutting the covering. Most Mirrormen, though, wanted the mental advantage that their shining armor had on drafters. Or, more likely, Kip thought, they thought that if they had to do all the work to keep mirror armor shining bright, they were for damn sure going to show it off when they got the chance.
They only gave an overview and talked about one color today: blue. The series would be ongoing, and Kip hoped to make it to all of them.
Suddenly, though, the classes all seemed optional. He certainly wasn’t going to go to the basic class with Magister Kadah, but that was the only class he technically had permission to skip. But there was too much else to do with war looming to waste on histories and hagiographies not directly related to the war.
‘Uses of Luxin in Art’? Now? Who were they joking?
Other than the engineers, it didn’t seem anyone else had broken out of their denial that the war was real—and that they might lose.
After that lecture, Kip went to lunch. None of the Blackguard inductees were there. Most were on a staggered schedule to allow them to make it to lectures and still go to practice. Kip saw the reject table where he’d sat just a few months ago. The group was gutted now. Teia and Ben-hadad had left, subsumed into the greater culture of the Blackguard. Kip had barely belonged at all, and the girl with the birthmark, Tiziri, had been sent home because of Kip’s failure, stakes in a game of Nine Kings with Andross Guile. That left only Aras.
The boy was sitting alone. Kip hesitated, and then went toward him.
Aras looked up before Kip could sit. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I was … going to eat,” Kip said. “Can I join—”
“I don’t need your pity.”
“Only people who need pity say that,” Kip said, the words crossing his lips before he could call them back.
“Never speak to me again.”
Kip gave up. He went and sat alone and ate his food in silence.
Not knowing what else to do with himself, Kip went downstairs. He’d still have Blackguard training later today, but he couldn’t bear to sit and do nothing. Hurry up and start training me, Karris.
He found his father’s training room almost exactly as he had left it, except the obstacle course had been rearranged. But Kip was drawn to the pull-up bar.
Before the Battle of Ru, that damned bar had been his daily humiliation. He’d come here alone so the others wouldn’t see how pathetic he was.
He jumped up and did a pull-up easily. Well, that had been a bit of a cheat. He’d had some momentum from jumping. He did another. And four more. Six?
Six!
He dropped to the ground, and for the first time, the burning in his muscles felt like proof of progress, rather than punishment for failure. He wrapped his hands and moved over to the old punching bag, activating the lights with some superviolet. For a half an hour, perhaps an hour, he sank into the simplicity of hitting. Condemnations and memories of mockery rose to the surface like dross in the heat of the exercises, and he hammered them away one by one. Mother’s sneering quips, Ram’s teasing, General Danavis’s disappointment, Aras’s bitterness, punch by punch. He went from hitting the bag with sloppy fury to punching with passionless precision.
The body mechanics were beginning to sink in, too. He was hitting faster, more precisely, and harder, lines of force tracing up from his planted feet, through his hips, his tight abdomen, to uncurl like a whipcrack as he drove his fist into the bag. It felt … glorious.
There was a slight tear in the leather seam high on the bag, and Kip fantasized about punching the bag so hard he tore it open. It didn’t happen, of course, but the fantasy kept him working.
He was just finishing up, unwrapping his hands, when the door cracked open. It was Teia.
“Thought I might find you here,” she said shyly. “You big dope, you’re going to be useless at practice. We’ll probably both have to run.” She grimaced. “Sorry, that came out all wrong.”
Kip grinned. “It’s good to see you, Teia.”
“You, too.” She hesitated. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. Up on deck, I mean. You’re my partner, and I wasn’t there when you needed me. I’ve been feeling pretty awful about it. And then you came back, and it—it wasn’t really the reunion I’d been hoping for.”
“About that…”
“Kip, I, I need to keep some secrets. Even from you. Can you trust me?”
When Kip thought of Teia, he thought of the petite girl whom he’d mistaken for a boy, months ago. A young slave, uncertain, in over her head. But also a girl who could accurately rank each of the Blackguard hopefuls and estimate that she was the fourth best of them, but somehow didn’t realize quite how excellent that made her against everyone else, or how smart she was to estimate so accurately.
This Teia wasn’t that Teia. Kip realized that while he was growing and changing through all the fights and all the old messages he’d told himself that he was realizing were lies, he had somehow thought that everyone else would stay the same. And it was a fool’s thought.
Teia was little, but that didn’t make her a child. She was being more mature than Kip had probably ever been in his life.
“I heard you saved the raid on Ruic Head,” Kip said.
Teia shrugged.
“Watch Captain Tempus said Commander Ironfist wanted to give you a medal.”
“What?”
“It got overruled by someone higher up, apparently.”
“In something regarding the Blackguards? Who could overrule—oh, don’t tell me.”
“That’s right,” Kip said. “So as long as you’re not working for that old cancer, sure, Teia, I trust you. You’re still on our side, right?”
She laughed, but there was something uncertain in it.
“Teia, you’re not … you’re not working for my grandfather, are you?”
“Kip—Breaker, I can’t tell you anything. But I will never betray you. You’re my best friend.”
“I am?”
She looked away awkwardly. Kip could have hit himself. Not the right response.
“I mean, I just thought that being my slave—”
“What?!” Her face flashed to angry.
“Wait wait wait!” He took a breath. “I wanted to be your friend, Teia. I was always afraid that when I—when I won your papers that it meant we couldn’t be friends. And I didn’t know how much of that stuck around. Even afterward, you know. I didn’t know if I’d always remind you of that. You’re my best friend, too.”
She looked mollified but still upset. “I’m more than my slavery, Kip.”
“And I’m more than a Guile, but it’s still there, like it or not.”
She pursed her lips, then nodded. She reached up and put a hand to a necklace she had, and Kip wanted to ask about it, but he could tell it was personal. A present from an old master, perhaps? Her face brightened, though her mouth twisted with chagrin. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. You know, calling you my best friend, like saying—like saying…” She grimaced.
“I didn’t take it wrong,” Kip said, rescuing her.
“You didn’t say it back because I—never mind. Can we go hit something?” She was blushing.
He had the sudden desire to grab her hand, but he didn’t. Why did he feel so awkward and young all of the sudden?
Teia said, “And you have to keep this from the squad.”
“No one will hear we’re friends from me,” Kip said gravely.
“Breaker!”
He grinned, sketched a quick sign of the three and the four, promising. She grinned back.
She moved to speak again, to explain more about not explaining about coming back to the Chromeria bloody, to defend herself somehow, but she let it go, and he credited it to her as maturity. The immature Teia would have checked and double-checked. Or should he think, ‘the slave Teia would have checked and double-checked’? Maybe this is who she always was, only held back by her slavery?
Well, I did one thing right, in my whole life.
“I missed you, Kip.” She grinned, and threw a towel to him.
He caught it, and his smile felt like it was going to break his cheeks.
“You ready to head up?” she asked.
He mopped his face. Good thing about going to Blackguard practice, he supposed—it was fine to go there sweaty.
The door cracked open behind them, and Grinwoody stepped in. Kip’s smile dropped.
“Good afternoon, young master … Guile,” the old slave said. As always, he was dressed carefully, looked wrinkled as an old apple, and had a demeanor as pleasant as a night of diarrhea.
“Grinwoody, you’re looking well!” Kip said with false cheer, deliberately invoking the familiarity of using the slave’s name. How long had Grinwoody been there? Dear Orholam.
“Your grandfather requires you.”
“For Nine Kings?” Kip asked.
“I believe so.”
“I’ve got Blackguard training,” Kip said. “I don’t want to play him now.”
“Your desires are irrelevant. The promachos has summoned you. You will come with me. Immediately.” The old man seemed to enjoy making Kip furious.
The promachos? Dear Orholam, no. So that’s how he had the authority to shut down access to the libraries. Dammit!
“Or what?” Kip said. He just couldn’t help himself, could he?
The Parian slave turned to Teia. “Or your friend here will be expelled.”
“Excuse me?” Teia said.
“You’ve not been addressed, slave. Be silent,” the old slave told her. Asshole.
“I’m not a slave,” Teia snapped.
“My mistake,” Grinwoody said. It clearly hadn’t been a mistake.
Well, that answered one question. Teia wasn’t working for Andross. He wouldn’t threaten one of his own, would he? Or would he, so secure in his belief that Kip wouldn’t let harm come to her?
Was Andross so good that he was comfortable playing against his own cards, knowing someone else would save them?
Kip felt ill, and he felt afraid. He was trying to match wits against this? Andross Guile was godlike in his intellect, and in his ruthlessness. Kip had called Magister Kadah’s bluff, saying she could never expel someone who was nearly a Blackguard. But Andross could expel anyone he wanted. He was now the promachos. It was a calamity.
“I’m not ready,” Kip said.
“He doesn’t require your readiness, he requires your presence.”
Kip cursed under his breath. “I really hate you, Grinwoody,” he said.
Grinwoody gave a thin-lipped grin. “The heart breaks, sir.”