Chapter 47
Teia couldn’t stop looking at her bloody hands. Half under her breath, she said, “Wasn’t right.”
“Huh?” Kip asked.
“What we did. That wasn’t right,” she said. She looked up at him, and felt shame cover her like a snowdrift blowing off Hellmount itself. She said, “I murdered a man.”
The safe house where they’d gathered wasn’t even a house. It had been a chicken coop built onto the side of a cooper’s shop. None of them knew when the Blackguard had acquired the place, but it had been walled off from the cooper’s, had a few tools propped up around the low front door, and was made to look like a shed. Inside, the ground had been excavated to make the single room far bigger than looked possible from the outside. Half a dozen bunk beds, three high, lined the walls. A stove cleverly piped to share the cooper’s chimney rested on one wall. Stores of food and weapons and clothing took up most of the rest of what little space there was.
“You—we—killed a man,” Kip said.
“Oh, what difference is there? He’s dead! I messed up!”
“We’re warriors, Teia,” Kip said like she was being stupid. “That’s what all this is for.”
“I know! I know,” she said. She looked around at the rest of their squad. She shook her head. She was letting them down. She should just shut up. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be fine. Can you throw me the fucking towel already, Ferkudi?”
“You’ll get it when I’m done, bitch,” Ferkudi said. He was usually good-natured, but when he wasn’t, he was an ogre.
Kip moved faster than Teia would have believed he could. He grabbed Ferkudi by the front of his tunic in both hands and lifted the young man off his feet and slammed his back against the wall. “That’s my partner,” he said. “That’s your squadmate. I know you’re shaken up. But. Don’t.”
Ferkudi’s feet weren’t even touching the ground—and Ferkudi was one of the biggest boys in the squad. Holy shit. Kip was getting strong.
Kip released him. “Towel. Please.”
Ferkudi handed the towel over. Looked away. “Sorry,” he grumbled.
“To her.”
“Sorry, Teia,” he rumbled. “Didn’t mean to be such a flesh protuberance.”
“I’ll take it outta you in training,” Teia said. She hit him in the arm, not too gently. But she was glad he’d apologized. She liked Ferkudi, but that had infuriated her, and she didn’t have it in her to take him down a peg herself. Not right now.
Kip handed her the towel. “You were saying?”
She took the towel angrily, which he didn’t deserve, and she knew it, and it made her angrier. “Get off it, Breaker. You’re not my father.” It wasn’t fair. She’d felt gratified that he’d come to her defense, but she was suddenly just so angry, so close to tears.
“No, but I’ve killed men. Spit it out.”
Teia began wiping her hands off. Stared firmly down at the towel, her hands, the task. “What if … what if they have a point? The Blood Robes, I mean.”
“To hell with them,” Winsen said. “Kill ’em all. Let Orholam sort ’em.”
Teia had heard similar statements before, but they’d been boasts. Childishness. With Winsen, it didn’t seem like a put-on.
“No,” Kip said. “Teia …Of course they have a point.”
“What are you saying?” Cruxer asked, speaking up for the first time. He’d been content to let his squad work through things themselves, but Teia could tell he didn’t want the conversation to veer into heresy.
“No one’s saying the Chromeria is perfect, Teia. There’s a price for law, and we see that all around us. The Chromeria has power, and in places, it abuses its power. Welcome to the human race. Lawlessness has a price, too. I grew up in Tyrea, the closest thing to the kind of lawless paradise that the Blood Robes hold forth. Tyrea is a lot of things, but paradise?” Kip gave a derisive snort.
“Think about the Blackguard. Think about its leadership. Commander Ironfist may be the best man any of us know. Watch Captain Blademan, a good, good man. Not very imaginative—”
“Breaker, you can’t—” Cruxer began, but Kip ran right over him.
“Of course I can!” Kip said. “We’re Blackguards! We’re not afraid of the truth! Remember? Not very imaginative, but dutiful, hardworking, loyal to a fault. An excellent second-tier leader. We lost Watch Captain White Oak, obviously, but she was totally capable, too. Watch Captain Tempus? Bookish but clever, better in charge than in a charge, but competent. Watch Captain Beryl? She’s a little too friendly for an officer, but good. Blunt? Not quite friendly enough, but again, good. Then I look at the squads above us, and for the most part, I admire them. I look at us, and we’re the best I can think of. Am I right, Captain?”
“It’s why I gave up my promotion,” Cruxer said quietly. “Half of it, anyway.” Teia and the squad knew the other half. It was the same as theirs. Lightbringer.
“What’s your point?” Teia asked Kip.
Kip said, “If Cruxer hadn’t been willing to risk throwing away his own career, Aram would be in this squad right now. He was a rat, and despite all our good leaders, he was this close to getting in. Maybe he would have been discovered before he made full Blackguard, but with how undermanned we are, I doubt it. He probably would have taken final vows within a year’s time. And that’s with the Blackguards doing almost everything right. Even with us, let’s be honest. Some of those who have made it in aren’t squeaky clean. Some of us—even us inductees—have had blackmail or bribes tried on us. Why? Because we’re powerful and we’re going to be more powerful soon; because we have what others want. Some of us stumble, and some of us are downright rotten—despite every advantage, right? I mean, we’re respected, we’re paid well, we have all we need, we have extra attention paid to us, we have the best the Chromeria can give us—and we still have weakness and venality and betrayers among us.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ferkudi said.
“Yes it is,” Kip said. “You just don’t want to face it yet.”
“No one’s tried to bribe or blackmail me,” Ferkudi said.
“Ferk,” Kip said, exasperated. “It’s because they think you’re too dumb to bribe and too unpredictable to blackmail and too apt to talk to be charmed. They’re wrong on the first count.”
Ferkudi blinked like a dog whose nose had been swatted.
But Kip went right on. “But that’s not the point. If a group with the small size, the wealth, the good leadership, and all the advantages of the Blackguard can have its members go bad, how could we possibly expect a group that’s so much larger, and more powerful, and spread out over all the satrapies—with poor leadership in some areas—to be more virtuous than we are?”
“You mean the Chromeria,” Teia said.
“I do.”
“I expect it because they made vows before Orholam,” Big Leo said, speaking up for the first time. “Because they are Orholam’s hands on earth. They shouldn’t fail that kind of a holy trust.”
“No,” Kip said. “They shouldn’t. Men and women should never violate their oaths.”
“But they do,” Ferkudi said. Bless him, always stating the obvious. But then, sometimes the obvious benefited from being dragged out into the full glare of the light.
“The Blood Robes are liars leading na?fs,” Kip said. “They don’t want to live up to the oaths they took that when they became a danger, they’d end themselves. They’re afraid and unfaithful, so they say their vows don’t count. They want to lord their power over others, so they say the Chromeria unfairly lords its power over them. The Chromeria says that every man is equal in Orholam’s sight, that our powers and privileges make us the greater slaves of our communities. I don’t admire Magister Kadah, but she’s right about that much. On the other hand, the Color Prince says drafters are above other men by nature—and at the same time talks about abolishing slavery. Tell me, if drafters are above other men by nature, why would you abolish slavery?”
Silence reigned for a few long moments.
“Because he needed an army,” Cruxer said. “And coming from Tyrea, he had to pass the mines at Laurion and the tens of thousands of slaves there.”
“To divide your enemy,” Daelos said. “Armies afraid of what their own slaves will do when they’re gone won’t go far from home.”
“Understand that everything the Color Prince does, he does for power, and you’ll understand everything he does,” Kip said.
“It can’t be that simple, can it?” Teia said. “If so, how come you see it, and no one else does?”
“Because I’m a bad person, so I understand how bad people think.”
What the hell did he mean by that? Was he fishing for compliments?
But Kip was still speaking. “Don’t judge a man by what he says his ideals are, judge him by what he does. Look at what the Color Prince has done. They’re wrong, Teia. They’re liars and murderers. It doesn’t mean everything we do is right. It doesn’t mean our house doesn’t need a thorough cleaning. I just don’t think we need to burn it to the ground to do it.”
Ferkudi nodded his head. “My folks had a saying: the fact your dog has fleas is no reason to open your home to a wolf.”
“My dad used that one, too. But he said, wife, rash, bed, and whore,” Winsen said.
Goss said, “A lesson he had to learn the hard way, no doubt.”
Ferkudi laughed with them. Then he said, “I don’t get it.”
“It’s one of those things, Ferk,” Goss said.
“Where if you explain it, it doesn’t work?” Ferkudi asked. He was familiar with those. “Flesh protuberance!”
Worst swear ever. Second worst, maybe. For a while he’d used ‘proboscis.’
“You think it’s that simple, Breaker?” Teia asked, ignoring the boys.
“In the False Prism’s War, Gavin’s generals ordered the burning of Garriston. It was stupid. It was wrong. Horrific. The fires spread, and they killed scores of thousands. It wasn’t strategy; it was vengeance for what happened in Ru, but far worse. But Gavin had to win the war. And after he won, he couldn’t punish those who did it, though I’m sure he wanted to. They said—and maybe they even believed—that what they had done was necessary to win. So he gave them medals and showed them the door. Not one of those involved in burning Garriston is here on the Jaspers anymore. You think that’s a coincidence? Those men are no longer in any position where they could do something like that again. Was what Gavin did once the deed had been done good? No. But it was the best thing possible.”
“And this?” Teia asked, showing her still-bloodied hands and the bloody rag that wouldn’t get the stains out completely. “This is the best thing?”
Kip stared her hard in the eye. He took the towel in his own clean hands and smeared blood first on one palm and then on the other. “Not the best thing, Teia. The best thing possible? A thousand times yes.”
And staring into his eyes, she believed him. It was a damned thing, war, but she wasn’t damned for fighting it. It shifted her burden only a little—not much, but enough.
Twenty minutes later, after the squad had cleaned up, after Cruxer had debriefed each of them in turn, they formed up at the door of the safe house to go back to the Chromeria together and report. It was obviously a duty Cruxer wasn’t relishing.
“Teia,” Cruxer said. “Up front.”
“Huh?”
“You’re my number two now. First sergeant.”
Teia looked at Ferkudi, whom she was displacing. He didn’t look angry. “The promotion was my idea, Teia,” he said. “We froze up out there. I froze up. You deserve it.”
Deserve it? She’d gone crazy out there. She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she simply took her new place.
“What about Breaker?” she asked.
“Breaker is Breaker,” Cruxer said. “He, uh, doesn’t fit exactly in the chain of command. When it’s time to listen to him, we listen. The rest of the time, he listens to us. Fair, Breaker?”
Kip looked bereaved, but resolute. “So it begins?” he asked Cruxer quietly.
Teia had no idea what they were talking about. “It began a long time ago, Breaker,” Cruxer said. “The only question is if you fight fate or try to steer it.”
“Fate?” Kip asked. “You’re the one who gave me the name Breaker in the first place.”
“Oops,” Cruxer said. A wry grin.
“Fair enough, Captain. I’ll take the half-step to the outside. I wanted this more than anything, though. You know that, right?”
“I know what it is to want … the impossible.” His mouth twisted, and Teia knew he was thinking of Lucia.
Kip said, “You’re the best of us, Cruxer. In every way. Don’t you dare die, you understand?”
“Meh, I’m invincible,” Cruxer said. “Now let’s get back, double time. Let’s see if we can work some more of this off.” He poked Kip in the belly, and they both grinned.
Boys. How Teia loved them both.