Chapter 75
Being dead wasn’t what Kip expected. He was still himself, so he wasn’t in a card, of that much he was certain. He’d triggered a trap Janus Borig had left on the cards, then. She’d certainly loved her lethal-and-easily-tripped-by-her-friends traps.
It was dark in here. Dark as a tomb—dark as if his eyes were closed. Which they were. Little Kipling, not the brightest color in the spectrum. He was lying facing down on a polished hardwood floor. He stood up—that was good. Good that he could move, right?—and found that he was in a library.
No, maybe not a library, more like the Library. Shelves of a curious, luminous red wood marched in lines to the horizon. Leagues of shelves, each five or six times the height of a man. Kip’s eyes traced the lines of a nearby shelf loaded with the new pressed books up, and up. There were ladders on rollers to reach the higher shelves, but there was no ceiling. The night sky itself gleamed high above, undistorted, stars unwinking, clearer than Kip had ever seen them.
Kip was no astrologer, but he didn’t see a single constellation that he recognized. A sudden sense of vertigo swept him, as if he were going to go flying off the ground and out into that void. He slammed his eyes down to the shelves again.
Atasifusta. That was the wood. The wood that burned forever. Except here, it was merely burnished to such a high sheen that it provided warm ambient light for the whole library. Neat trick. Kip took a step forward and looked down an aisle to see how wide it was.
There was no end.
He stepped back to his spot, as if to find safety.
He took a deep breath. Wait, was that the first breath he’d taken since he’d been here? Did he have to breathe, being dead and all? Oh, he was breathing. Odd that he wasn’t scared. Confused, certainly. Curious, of course. But not a crumb of cowardice.
Maybe one crumb.
Is a crumb the unit of measure for cowardice?
He tried stepping into the aisle again. Ah, it wasn’t endless, it was merely so wide that it seemed so. Somewhere in an oceanic distance he could see something that had to be a wall, and to the other side, the same. Looking so far and being made aware of the expanse inspired vertigo again. Kip turned instead to look at what was near at hand.
A flurry of activity burst forth, the moment of creation appearing to only begin because he was there to observe it, the shelves near at hand filling with an explosion of texts, a blunderbuss blast of thought flew through the aether of every language and collided with the medium of its time: vast double-roll scrolls were unrolling, being filled with text by invisible quills, being illuminated whimsically, then advancing; whole pages of text were unrolled from a press, lined up like soldiers, and sliced apart and stitched to a binding before flying to their place on a shelf; papyrus was pounded flat in layers even as intricate glyphs danced across its surface; clay tablets were smoothed to uniform thickness, tiny punch marks of cuneiform wedges barely filling it before the tablets hardened in sun or kiln; bamboo was pounded flat, cured and stitched, script dropping down each column like rain: a thousand kinds of writing, on skin and on stone and on wood and on paper and on material for which he had no name; left to right, and right to left, and top to bottom, and all at once, and in no discernible order at all. Some of them flew to shelves nearby, but some—like the cuneiform—flew to distant shelves, rows back.
Almost at Kip’s feet, he saw scrawling—on a tabletop that looked like those in the lecture halls at the Chromeria. In a child’s awkward penmanship, written by an invisible hand, letters leapt out:
Majister Gold Thorn is a bitch
She went to the chirurjins with a notty itch
Majister they sed you have the pox
The only cure is lots of
The doggerel was never finished before it was whisked off to a shelf somewhere. Ooo, poor bastard. Kip couldn’t imagine Magister Goldthorn had taken the mockery well.
The old styles of writing that no one used anymore flew far away, and doggerel that had to have been written in the last ten years was nearby. So … What if this place held every word ever written? Every word. And every word, as written, was added.
Which meant Kip was standing at the present, facing the past, watching history roll slowly by to the left and right.
He turned around, expecting to be standing at the edge of a precipice or a blank.
But he was wrong. The future rose before him, league after league of shelves, crammed book after book—the scrolls slowly disappearing as the pressed books crowded them out, and were in turn replaced by shining metal or crystal pieces Kip couldn’t begin to identify somewhere in the distance. And there, beyond even those, far, far in the distance, but still visible, was the library’s wall.
The future ended.
Kip looked off to the sides again, and there, dimly could make out walls. To the past—and nothing. The past might be finite, but it went farther back than he could see, and the past was deeper than the future.
I die and go to a library? Sure, it could be worse, but I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries this year. Quite enough time, really. Do I have to stay forever? Where do I go pee?
I suppose the dead don’t pee.
In the same way they don’t breathe?
He was just about to start walking to explore the shelves when a man fell out of the sky. He landed with a sound like a rockslide, right in front of Kip. Somehow, his landing gave the impression that he’d been falling forever, and that the landing wasn’t even a strain on his knees. Sort of like Cruxer landing a jump. Even if Kip had lived to train in the Blackguard for a hundred years, he was pretty certain making a landing look light and easy was a skill he never would have mastered.
The man stood gracefully, fixed the cuffs of a shirt under a three-buttoned black jacket of a cut and shiny fabric Kip had never seen. Over the jacket, he wore a leather greatcoat, black on the outside, white on the inside, slim cut and hanging down to his pointed-toe leather boots. He took off a brimmed hat similar to a petasos and shook back a cascade of platinum-white hair that didn’t quite touch his collar. His features were paler than anyone Kip had ever seen, exotic, unearthly, perfect. He smiled, a genuine smile that touched his mirrored iridescent eyes, and his teeth were not quite white, but instead pearlescent, and the bit of dogtooth that Kip saw in that smile seemed longer and sharper than usual.
This man was not, Kip decided, a man. A shiver of fear ran down his spine, despite the man’s apparent friendliness and beauty, but then Kip thought, I’m already dead. What’s he gonna do to me?
Good thing fear is rational. Good thing you can talk yourself right out of it.
“Hail, Godslayer,” the stranger said. With his pretty face and sharp beard and immaculate coiffure, Kip had expected a tenor, but instead the voice emanating from this being was a bass—crisp, perfectly enunciated, not gravelly or an indistinct rumble, but a bass that sounded too big to be coming from this man-sized creature.
“Hail, scary guy who fell out of the sky.”
The stranger’s eye twitched as if with irritation. He smiled to cover it instantly, but not before a ragged crack shot from the corner of his eye where he’d twitched to his ear. It filled in as fast as it appeared, and left the smile alone on his face. “Hail, Godslayer,” he said again, as if being very patient.
“Hail … sir.” Puzzled. It was as if Kip was playing a game, and no one had told him the stakes, let alone the rules. It had happened enough in the last year that Kip should have been getting used to it. But this wasn’t the kind of thing you get used to. The man filled Kip with a quiet, nameless dread.
Already dead, can’t do anything to me. Oh, look at that. There may not be peeing in the afterlife, but it turns out that the strong desire to pee is indeed possible.
Which, in itself, was kind of terrifying.
Not moving from the spot where he’d landed, the man extended an open hand, tilted up. It wasn’t quite the attitude for a handshake or a wrist clasp, and Kip looked at it warily. Falling from the silent sky, something slapped into the man’s open hand. A polished black wood cane.
“You’ll excuse me the use of a cane, I hope,” the man said with a sound like great gears grinding. He stepped forward, and Kip could see that the man’s ankles were broken, poorly mended. Perhaps that was the reason for the stiff leather boots. “Under what name have you come here?”
Kip looked to the left and right. “Uh, is this a trick question?”
The man settled into place perhaps ten feet away from Kip, an odd distance for interlocutors. He put his cane centered before him and leaned on it with both hands like a three-legged stool. He waited.
“I am whatever I am. I mean, I am what I ever am. Kip. Kip,” Kip said. “Is there a privy here?”
“Kip? Kip. Not your birth name, is it? Kip, so puny, so insignificant. Barely worth three little letters. ‘Don’t look at me,’ it screams. ‘I’m just a bastard.’ Kip Delauria. Kip Guile. Lard Guile. Breaker. Godslayer. Perhaps Diakoptês? If you’re going to start collecting names in other languages and religions, this is really going to get tedious. But what are you under the names? Under your cloak of names, who are you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was known as a bit of a wearer of masks myself, you know. They called me … well, why ruin it? It became one of the first Black Cards, forbidden, for those who viewed it lost their minds. That, little Guile, from the tiny fraction of my power that can fit inside a card. You’re dying, right now. Oh, no worries, time is different here. We have all the time out of the world to talk, but your body is dying. I can save you.”
“Well, that solves that,” Kip said. “Here I didn’t know if you were a hero or a villain. Villain.”
“Really? It’s so easy for you?” the immortal asked.
“Not complicated,” Kip said. A million million books, and not one place to pee. “There’s a time for ratiocination, and a time for gut feelings. Gut wins, this time.” Ratiocination? Where did I even hear that word? Too much time in the restricted library.
“And if head and heart are equal, with which facility do you decide whether to follow the one or the other?” The creature smiled. He leaned on the cane with his left hand and propped his right hand on his hip. The move pushed back his long leather coat and revealed a pistol hanging in a special holster made for it at his right hip. It was actually kind of brilliant. Most people carried a pistol either in a bag or in a pocket. This design would make it far easier to draw quickly. It even had a tie at the bottom to keep the holster tight against the leg, so it wouldn’t flop around. Its wearer could always be certain of the position of his pistol. Kip would have to remember that.
Kip said, “You come across a dying man, and it’s in your power to help him—and you don’t. That’s villain behavior.”
Amused. Only a too-small ring of black pupil interrupted the eerie mirrored perfection of his eyes and showed where he was looking. “Ah, but you’re not dead yet. So perhaps you’re too hasty to judge me.”
Kip scowled. He had the distinct impression that the longer he listened to this man—Man? God? Something in between?—the more convinced he’d be. In that way, Kip’s tutelage under Gavin Guile was invaluable. Gavin tended to do the same thing.
“So I haven’t saved you. Yet. But neither has my enemy, now, has he?”
Enemy? “Who are you?” Kip asked. There was something odd about the leather of that long coat. Dual-layered, supple, yet so thin.
“Of course, he can’t save you. He doesn’t see. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t save. He is dead, and this world is ours.”
“Who are you?” Kip whispered. That was what it was about that coat. It was the pale white of the Angari on the inside, and that black was Parian black. Orholam have mercy, it was made of human skin.
“I am the Bearer of Fire; I am the Opener of Eyes; I have been called a god and a beast; I have been called angel and demon, and Slave of the Holy, and Breaker of Chains. I have been called jinn and monster and man. Those who hate me have called me Defiler, Seducer, Corrupter—and Master, and King. Wanderer, Outcast, Kinless, Unclean. I am the Right Hand of Darkness, the Voice of the Grave. I have slain kings and gods. I have come to bring true worship to the Seven Satrapies, to destroy what has been erringly wrought by human hands. The luxiats have shrouded my coming in darkness, but some things cannot be hidden forever. You know who I am.”
Kip’s metaphysical heart came into perfect synchronicity with his physical heart, and stopped. No.
“Say it.”
“You … you’re the Lightbringer.”
“I am.” The Lightbringer rolled his neck, and then his shoulders, and giant, glorious white wings unfurled from his back with a crack, emerging from long slits cut in the coat. His shirt tore, revealing a torso so white and flawless it could have been carved of living marble. He was larger than life, and more beautiful than any woman. It was more than simple beauty. It was raw presence, as if you magnified the melancholic yearning and pain of a perfect sunset a thousand times and stirred it with an animal lust to take and be taken and added glory like the true light of a summer day passing through a lens and burning Kip, the ant.
This is why the owl hunts at night; her eyes would burn in the sun. This is why man sees only his slim slice of the spectrum. To see more would be to be blinded. To see that for which his mind is not made was to be struck dumb.
Kip dropped to his knees, fell prostrate. He couldn’t help it. Had no strength. No will.
His hands slapped in the dust, in a position of worship, barely keeping his face from smacking the golden floor. The dust—dust? here? in this immaculate library?—swirled up in clouds into his open eyes before he could blink. In seconds, he was streaming tears, his tears turning humble dust to mud. The mud burned his eyes, but it wasn’t the burning of getting a speck in your eye, it was the burning of a muscle fatigued, a muscle growing stronger. The burning faded to tingling.
He looked up—and through, his eyes made new, silently made strong. Beneath a fa?ade of glory—a cloak of light—the wings were rotten; a stench of decaying flesh swept out in a putrid cloud; the skin was blackened and curling, split from flames, and something else, something utterly inhuman was beneath—all quickly covered. The immortal bared his fangs at the sky, and snarled in a language that Kip’s ears couldn’t parse into syllables, nor his tongue ever hope to form. Here was an angel of light indeed, for light can also be used to dazzle, to blind, to misdirect and deceive. Here was light bent to illusions and lies.
The masks slammed back in place, and the immortal said, “I am Abaddon, the King, one of the Two Hundred who marched out of the Tyrant’s palaces and went to make our own way in this wilderness, and a thousand worlds like it. I am a lover of queens and a father of gods. I am the Day Star, ushered from the heavens in glory.”
Stand.
Kip couldn’t tell if the voice came from within his head or outside of it, but his stubbornness agreed it was a good idea. He found strength, a little anyway, and stood slowly. “Marched out? Or were thrown out? So out of two hundred failures, I only rate you? What’s the fat son of a whore got to do to get some respect?”
The immortal laughed. “Save yourself, Kip. He won’t. Though if you do, He’ll take credit. Like always, sapping the achievements of the good and the great, making you doubt your own worth. If you’re strong enough to save yourself today, I’ll be back. When you’re ready. I have eternity. You have … minutes, or fifteen years, or seventy years at the most. It’s all the same to me. I will come again, in your hour of need, when your own strength fails. If you live so long.”
For some reason, that seemed a little more menacing than, ‘Fare thee well, see thee anon!’ Kip cleared his throat. “Not sure I’m understanding. If I live so long?”
“You man. Why do you think you’re here, in the Great Library where all the knowledge of your race’s five ages is stored?”
I’ve kind of been wondering that.
Abaddon seemed incredulous that Kip still didn’t get it, even with what he seemed to think was a generous hint. He shook his head. “Know this, O Kip. Your being here involves a compromise. Your mind is not structured to understand timelessness. So instead of being outside of time, you are instead carrying around with you a bubble of causality.”
“Hammerfist centaur granite,” Kip said gravely.
Ancient eyes wrinkled, irritated. “What?”
“I was, uh, trying to demonstrate how I could understand each of the three words in a three-word phrase and still have no clue what they mean together.” Kip grinned weakly.
Monster eyes flashed, and something seemed terribly wrong with that mouth as it spoke: “This library is outside of time, but your mind isn’t made to understand timelessness. So while you’re here, cause precedes effect. Which means you’re not fully removed from time. Your body is dying right now. You’re not breathing. Your heart has stopped. If you could go back now, you’d be yourself when you arrived. If you don’t get back soon, you’ll be alive, but a simpleton, perhaps with no control of your limbs, or your bowels, perhaps too gone to even care. You wait a few seconds more back in time, and you’ll simply be dead.”
Oh.
Oh, shit!
“You think I’m being awfully helpful for a villain, don’t you?”
Actually, Kip hadn’t gotten that far yet. He was still a little hung up on the bubble of causality part. But now that he mentioned it …
Abaddon folded his wings. They slipped easily back into slits in the sides of his human-leather coat. There was something about the greatcoat that drew the eye, more than simply its repulsive materials. It shimmered. Everything about this godling breathed extravagance, from the delicate ivory lace at his cuffs to the subtle blue silk pinstriping in his straight-legged trousers. He assumed his posture again, left hand on cane, right hand on hip. He noticed Kip’s glance fall to his pistol.
“There are rules here,” Abaddon said. “These very clothes come from hundreds of years in your future. It’s forbidden that I show a mortal things from after his time. Never was much for rules.”
“What are you?” Kip asked instead.
“In this form? A lone wanderer, an icon, a card from a deck not yet painted. Your descendants, like you, will believe that every excellence is praiseworthy. This figure is good at killing. Nothing more. Killing and moving on, with impunity, as if above their petty laws, as if a god. And how they will worship it. Indeed, they would worship you, O … Kip,” he said, the word like a popping bubble, as if he were delighted by insubstantiality of it. “By this time you’ve already killed a god and a king and fought a sea demon at the very walls of—oh, my, no, not that, not yet.”
He smiled, and Kip thought that was a trap, a little false prophecy that would probably get him killed. If he made it that far.
“You want to see it?” In a move faster than human thought, the pistol was in Abaddon’s hand. “I made it with my own hands, sacrificing precious days out of eternity to Make. It has been long and long since I have done such, and it will be millennia, I think, before I do so again. I named her Comfort. Do you think that your chromaturgy is magic? What is the most irritating thing about a pistol?”
This wasn’t right. There was more going on here than Kip could grasp. “I don’t know. The inaccuracy. The black powder blinding and burning you after you fire.”
“I fixed those, too, but think bigger.”
Kip was fascinated, but this … this was a smokescreen, just like the black powder. “I don’t care,” he lied. “Why are you doing this?”
“Reloading. Reloading is the most irritating part of a pistol. Some two hundred years hence, they discover a reliable rotating cylinder to give multiple shots before reloading is necessary. I copied the form so as to not stand out, but this pistol … no reloading. Ever. Reloads itself. That, that is magic. Do you want to know how I did it? I came perilously close to violating the basic laws of the universe to do so. A magic engine, within an inanimate object?”
“So you infused an object with Will, so what?” This was all a trap, but Kip couldn’t see what the trap was. And what the hell was an engine? He’d heard of siege engines, of course, but Abaddon was using the word as if it meant something else.
“It’s one thing to infuse an arrow’s feathers to seek a target that you lock in your mind. It’s something altogether different to make an item that uses magic itself. It is an act of creation, one might say.”
Kip ignored the answer, searching, searching. If he made it out of this, he could remember this conversation and comb through it to find out what mattered. But right now, he had to cast about, find the teeth of the trap. “What did you mean, precious days of your eternity? If you’re outside of time, what does it matter how long you spend?”
“Even as there are compromises when your kind comes here, carrying with you cause and effect in rigid order, so too are there compromises when my kind goes to your lands. Even I. We’re immortal, not omnipresent.”
Suddenly Kip wished he hadn’t skipped his theology lectures so often. ‘Attributes of Orholam’ had seemed a little outside of what would be useful in his life. If only he’d known. “I don’t follow,” he said.
“We can enter your time at any point and place we wish.”
“But you can’t be two places or more at the same time.”
“So your mortal mind can slowly churn out the obvious.”
Kip suddenly got it. “So if you spent two weeks in the Angari archipelago this year, crafting your pistol, you couldn’t leave and come back to that same two weeks ever again. You could leave and come back to some other place, either before or after, but you couldn’t inhabit the same time. You have all eternity to visit as you please, but you can only visit it once. That’s why you call them your ‘precious days of eternity.’ Eternity is limitless, but our time is finite, and so, when you visit here, your time is finite, too. Which means if you go to the wrong place at a certain time, you can never fix what you did there. It means you can be fooled!” Kip laughed, delighted. “That has to be a burr under the blanket, huh? All eternity to visit except for the bits where you need to go. You made a pistol, but you have to fear forever that those very two weeks you spent in our time were the two weeks you needed to be somewhere else. Ha ha ha!”
A quick flash of rage rippled over that mask of a face, disturbing and cracking it, and filling in immediately, as before, but not before Kip saw something beneath it, green and black, the mouth all wrong, the eyes huge and alien.
“So the fly taunts the spider about problems too late to fix? From my very web?”
Oh, no. And there it was. The teeth of the trap.
Abaddon said, “Truth is, the longer you stand here and listen to me, the closer to death you are. Truth is, you’re dead already. You’re—”
“Truth is, you’re still talking, which means lying, which means I’m still a threat. Somehow. That must irk you. Me. Little fat Kip of Rekton. A threat.” Kip chuckled involuntarily. Such a silly thought, and yet, why else would he even be worth the attention of such a being? But that was beside the point now, a distraction. Don’t pat yourself on the back while there’s a dagger in it.
Kip turned away, to where the invisible hands were writing, drawing, etching, hammering. That was the crux, that was the present, that was where the answer lay.
A short inhuman roar, the size of the creature that the man disguised, sounded. Abaddon did not like being dismissed.
Kip flinched, and out of body, out of time, and all that he might be, he was still surprised he didn’t wet himself at the noise. But he didn’t turn. If that thing wanted to kill him, if it was allowed to do so by whatever murky rules governed this place, there was clearly nothing Kip could do to stop it.
“Know this, Diakoptês, I may not be allowed to kill you here, but my hands are not bound in—” He stopped. “Should you leave, I will follow, and there is no foe who compares.”
“Shut it. I’m thinking.” Oh Ramir, I never thought I would have a reason to thank you for anything, but for this I thank you, you small-souled, small-hearted, small-town tough: I know how to needle a bully when he can’t get to me. For that, thank you.
Now, why am I in the Great Library?
It’s the repository of all knowledge. So what does that—
Kip looked at the invisible hands again. They were drawing glyphs right now. Pictures as words. Pictures as knowledge. Knowledge in every language, in every medium.
Perhaps even the knowledge in cards. Perhaps even the knowledge in cards inside careless young fools.
I’m here because this place is the repository of all knowledge, and I’m here until I get all this knowledge out.
Kip looked down at himself for the first time. He was absolutely covered in tattoos. On every exposed bit of skin, every place a card had stuck to him, it had left its image. Perhaps they’d left more than their image, perhaps they’d left their essence. It didn’t fully make sense to him. Why hadn’t the cards come here the moment of their creation? But maybe he was asking a time-bound question—time that he was running out of.
He turned over his left wrist.
Gunner.
The crazed Ilytian was wearing a waistcoat, open over a naked torso, sailor’s loose pants, no shoes, and a huge grin. He was seated on a smoking cannon like he was riding it. It was bigger than any cannon Kip had ever seen. Gunner also had a blunderbuss in his left hand and a pistol with multiple long barrels in his right hand. Like the first time Kip had seen him, the man had woven burning slow matches into his long unruly hair and beard and into his waistcoat to make himself look like he had come striding out of hell. Gunner? I’ve got to go be Gunner?
Fine, Gunner, let’s dance.
Kip bunched his fingers in the familiar pattern to touch the five jewels: one at each corner, and the middle finger at the middle top. One at a time, he pressed them onto the tattoo of Gunner, fully expecting nothing to happ—
~Gunner~
Tap. Superviolet and blue. As his thumb touched, it was like someone had blown out a candle. The world went dark. Eyes useless. But then, a moment later, there was sun, waves washing over him, blinking, bobbing. Seeing his perspective shift while he felt his body utterly motionless made him queasy.
Tap. Green solved that in a rush of embodiment, touch restored. He was swimming. A strong body, wiry, naked to the waist. The water is warm, strewn with flotsam.
Tap. Yellow. Hearing restored, the shouts of men calling to each other, others screaming in pain or terror. But yellow is more than that; it is the logic of man and place. But the yellow in this one isn’t quite right. Disbelieving. The Prism came out of nowhere. Dodged all his cannon shots. Even when Gunner finally started shooting both at once. That little boat the Prism made moved at speeds he wouldn’t have believed if he’d heard another telling the tale. Ceres is going to take this out on him. Damn Gavin Guile.
But this mind skips around. There’s something—
Tap. Orange. The smell of the sea and smoke and discharged powder, and he can sense the other men floating in the water, and below them, around them— Oh, by the hells. Sharks. Lots of sharks.
His finger is already descending. Tap. Red-and-sub-red-and-the-taste-of-blood-in-his-mouth-and-it’s-too—
The trick with sharks is the nose. Not so different from a man. You bloody a bully’s nose, and he goes looking elsewhere right quick. Easy, right? Easy.
Gunner ain’t no easy meat. The sea’s my mirror. Fickle as me. Crazy as me. Deep currents, and monsters rise from her depths, too. What others call sea spray, I call her spitting in my face, friendly like—
Kip tore his hand away as soon as it touched all the points—instantly—but that instant was minutes long in the card. He’d not left until he’d—until Gunner had killed a shipmate named Conner, who had the oars. Kip had just seen Gunner make himself a captain and get his first crew. The benighted madman.
Finding himself back in the Great Library, Kip looked down at his wrist. The tattoo was faded, but not gone. Right in front of him, a hand had drawn half of the card, hanging in midair. And now it stopped.
He had to go back into the same one. There was something important about Gunner. He had to find the right time. He had no idea what he was doing, but he had to learn.
Kip’s fingers descended into a raid on an Angari ship, the murder of men, the lopping of limbs, and a little singsong, ‘Rinky, sinky, dinky, do.’ He pulled his hand off again, unable to bear it.
And the tattoo still wasn’t gone.
Twice more he submerged himself into that ill-fitting skin, and emerged, gasping, weeping. But the card before him was being drawn, and split: one copy flew to his hand, and one went winging to a shelf.
Time out of joint, Kip stares at his wrist. The Gunner tattoo is disappearing even as the hands finish drawing the card. But then his tattoos move, shift, rearrange themselves, and there on his wrist sits Samila Sayeh, the heroine from the Prisms’ War.
“You’ll never make it,” Abaddon said. For some reason, his coat was gone, but he had a cloak of the same black and white leather spread in his hands. “Even if you could live every card in turn. Even if any human could take that much punishment, you don’t have the time.”
Kip didn’t answer. There was no answer. There was no giving up.
“Samila, let’s dance.” His hand came down.
But it didn’t end with Samila. It didn’t end with Helane Troas. It didn’t end with Viv Grayskin. It didn’t end with Aheyyad Brightwater or Usem the Wild or Halo Breaker or the Fallen Prophet or Pleiad Poros or the Novist or Orlov Kunar or New Green Wight or Heresy.
He was dimly aware that after he finished each tattoo each card flew off into the library, and at least once he saw Abaddon sweep the cloak out like a net, trying to catch a card before it disappeared, but each card seemed to fly right through it, barely slowed. It was one too many things to worry about. Kip went into card after card, sands running out.
Every time, when he felt for whatever reason that he’d seen enough, he removed his hand. He barely had any awareness of himself, none, perhaps, until the moment came to take his hand away. Nor was there any processing of the memories. He had no idea who the majority of these people and things were; he didn’t even connect Vox from the Shimmercloak card and from Janus Borig’s home until his hand was descending onto the next tattoo.
The integration of Kip to card was complete, but the disintegration that followed was ever incomplete: it wasn’t merely a melding of mind to mind, it was union. Spiritual. Emotional. And definitely physical. When he came back from a man who’d lost an arm, he felt the pain, not just after that card to be blotted out by the next card, but after that next card, too. The list of injuries piled up, and even without them, he was seeing men and women at the pivotal crises of their lives: terror was the norm, physical battle common, hatred and cowardice and heroism all piled together.
At first, he regathered his wits each time, reminded himself who he was, wiped away what blood he could from his bleeding nose, took a breath, then tapped the next. Then he merely took a breath, glaring at Abaddon, feeling wetness trickling from his ears. He died a hero’s death. He betrayed his closest friends. He took his own life, screaming a spray of teeth as he fired the blunderbuss pointed at his chin.
He found himself on his knees, weeping, blood and tears covering his wrist. But he didn’t stop. He wiped his forehead with an arm, giving himself a single breath. His forearm came away bloody. He was sweating blood. That couldn’t be good.
“No,” Abaddon said, dismayed.
Hand down. The Technologist. What the hell? This was Ben-hadad. He was some kind of genius. Never would have guessed.
“I—”
Hand down. The Commander. It was Cruxer, and not just Cruxer now, but Cruxer as he would be, facing—but as soon as Kip lifted his hand, he lost the future parts.
“—won’t—”
Hand down. Incipient Wight. And Kip lived the conversion, saw the how, and the why, and what worked, and what the wight thought worked, but some still part of Kip saw it was a delusion.
“—allow—”
Hand down. High Luxiat. The man was only beneath the Prism in the future. But first, as a young man, Quentin was taking an order from—from Brother Tawleb. Raising a pistol in a familiar alley. Missing. Blood squirting from a young woman’s neck as she stepped into the line of fire. Soul horror at the mistake.
Something about that—Lucia?—no, no time.
“—this.”
Three cards left. Kip was going to make it.
Beneath the blood and tears and mud obscuring his wrist, Kip saw the next card slide into place: the Butcher of Aghbalu. Orholam, no. That was Tremblefist’s card. No, no, no.
He couldn’t let himself think.
Hand down.
The perfect joy of battle rage, the heady potency of matching skill to skill and overmatching each, of tearing what every man valued most from his arms and proving, time and again, to be the best, to be untouchable, to be godlike in his power, in his slaying grace, to be so feared that bowels loosened and hearts literally stopped as the shadow of this avenging god fell upon them. The agony sang inside him and found company in the agony he left—lopping off hands and feet and leaving men to bleed, gut-wounding others, slashing off jaws, eviscerating, crushing faces, and killing, killing, killing. His palace became his charnel house. He returned to the maimed and sometimes found their women comforting them, and he killed their women before them, that their agony might pitch higher before they knew the release of death.
And it was not enough. The rage ran hot, the rage ran cold, the rage ran out, and still he was killing when the sun rose. And the sun showed that he had not only killed enemies. His own slaves lay dead among their new masters, the Tiru. He had no recollection of killing them, aside from some half-remembered screams, but the wounds matched the wounds he’d left in five hundred others.
He staggers back to the upper court where his wife lies dead, almost unrecognizable from the beatings, raped to death by the invaders. He goes there to end it.
He drops the double swords from gory hands. Pulls her into his arms as the sun rises. Smears the blood away from her broken, battered face. Rearranges her bloody torn dress into some pathetic semblance of decency. Holds her in his arms, draws his dagger.
This woman has a mole on her neck.
This woman isn’t Tazerwalt. This isn’t his wife. This is her handmaid, Hada, dressed in her lady’s garments.
He stands, trembling, an image flashing through his head, a slave girl rushing him. A horrid intuition. A sickness unto death. A stone in his gullet.
He finds the room. Tazerwalt. His wife, disguised as a slave. She’d been alive, unharmed by the Tiru attackers, hidden, until he’d come. A slave girl had rushed him. A slave girl, loyal to the Tiru, surely. Thinking it an attack, he’d slashed her neck as she threw herself at him, and he’d moved on, heedless.
Her eyes are open, questioning, and dead. So very dead.
He falls to his knees, screaming. Mind tearing, separating from himself. He sees a man, caked in blood, screaming. His screams sound no different than any of a hundred others he’s heard all night. His throat is tearing, unable to contain the force of his suffering.
Kip lifted his hand, convulsing. For some reason, his whole body was in pain, as if all his muscles had cramped at once. He fell over, blinded, unable to breathe. The wave passed, leaving him gasping. He blinked his suddenly clouded eyes clear. Wiped at them. Looked at red fingers. Touched his forehead. No, no wounds to his scalp or forehead. He was bleeding from his eyes.
That, Ferkudi would say, was a real flesh protuberance.
“You’re too late. You’re dying,” Abaddon said, sweeping the cloak back up onto his shoulders. “All this suffering for nothing.”
A sound escaped Kip’s lips, and for all the times he’d hated his body for its petty betrayals and awkwardness, this time, it did him proud: the sound was far more growl than moan. Emboldened by his own flimsy fa?ade of defiance, Kip rolled to his knees.
“You’re wrong,” he said, voice raspy, breath short. “See, I have a gift.”
“A few.”
“No, just the one.”
“Pray tell.”
“I’m fat. So I’m out of breath. Maybe dying. Hell, I’ve felt worse climbing a flight of stairs.” I’m fat, he didn’t have the breath to say, but when everything’s hard for you, something being hard isn’t much deterrent to doing it anyway. I’m fat, and there’s only one person in this room who gets to make jokes about me.
But Abaddon was grinning. “You’ve already lost, Lard Guile. This wasn’t me visiting you in the Great Library. This was a raid. Your coming here broke open a gap in our enemies’ defenses. You’re so predictable. By stalling you, I made you hurry. I could never have found all the new cards myself. You brought them to me.” He spread the cloak open, and on the white inside, Kip saw images, like tattoos, of every single card. They hadn’t escaped Abaddon—he’d somehow copied them all.
Kip had no idea what it meant, but something Corvan had said once made him react instinctively: ‘If your enemy wants it, deny it.’
Andross Guile, you asshole, tell me that I’ve got something of you in me. Your every victory, your every taunt, every time you turned a loss into a victory of another sort and soured the wine of winning to gall in my very mouth. Speak, O blood of Guile. Sing in me of the rage of the man skilled in all ways of contending. Sing of the blood of a beast and a god—
Blood.
Kip scrapes the blood from his wrist, feeling lightheaded. Only two images remain. He laughs, for the final two tattoos are the Lightbringer and the Turtle-Bear. But these two sit side by side in his wrist.
A choice. Kip has no doubt of it. There is only time to touch one. The image of the Lightbringer looks holy, a beam of light from heaven illuminating his face, washing out his features so it’s impossible to discern them.
Janus Borig asked for her brushes when she was dying. Asked for them, because she knew who the Lightbringer was. Had she started that card and never finished the face?
No. This tattoo isn’t unfinished.
What it is, or what it can be, is a trap. A trap for Kip—and now Kip’s trap.
Kip lifts his hand, bunches his fingers, using the periphery of his vision to see how Abaddon reacts. Fear that Kip will touch the Lightbringer. Good. Kip moves.
“No!” Abaddon shouts. “No!” He twists his cane and a blade flicks out from its heel. He stabs Kip’s arm in the tattoo of the Lightbringer. Power arcs through Abaddon’s cane, and the tattoo bursts apart like a popped soap bubble. Too easily, as if it had been waiting for it.
Kip flips sideways from the force of the blow, his other hand slapping at Abaddon’s face as he falls.
When he looks up, Abaddon looks confused. There’s a hole in the illusions hiding his face, his chin and beard plucked off entirely, the rest of the mask shimmering—and dissolving.
He is no man under that projected beauty. His head a locust’s head. His mouth mandibles, stretching and snapping sideways. His eyes monstrous, inhuman. The wings barely protruding from his back are the clacking wings of an insect god. And the moment he touches Kip, there’s a change in the air of the Great Library. Even Kip, bent and broken, can feel the power gathering, a kind of magic beyond mortal ken.
By touching Kip, he’s entered Kip’s time, his bubble of causality. And if there’s one thing fat kids understand, after getting beat down into a puddle of blubber and humiliation, it’s being overlooked and disregarded.
But blubber bounces back.
Shooting a look at something Kip couldn’t see, Abaddon roared, “What do I care for your rules?! I am I! I am the Day Star! I am of the firstborn, and I. Will. Not. Be Moved!” His turn swept the hem of his cloak toward Kip, almost brushing him with it.
If there’s one thing fat kids understand, it’s momentum.
With a roar, Kip leapt onto Abaddon’s back. Every Blackguard lesson forgotten, he was an animal, tearing at his prey. He was the fucking turtle-bear, ready to take punishment as long as he could give more punishment back. His weight nearly knocked Abaddon off his broken ankles, and Abaddon barely caught himself on his cane. Screaming, Kip scratched at his eyes, tore at his neck, and lunged for that precious pistol.
But the move was a feint. With only one hand free, Abaddon grabbed on to his precious pistol. Instead, Kip tore the cloak off his neck and kicked off. Abaddon fell.
His masks down, Abaddon was all snarling, shrieking insect. He drew the pistol from its holster smoothly, those great bulbous eyes unreadable.
At that moment, something seemed to resound through the entire library, a great pulse, a great weight settling—and Abaddon was ejected, utterly, instantly. Not physically, for he merely disappeared, but Kip had the very distinct impression that the psychic shock of it had to be tremendous.
It was like a child addressing a tidal wave, saying, I will not be moved—and before the words are out of his mouth, all is ocean, leaving no sign; not only no sign of the child, but no sign of his defiance, no sign that anything opposed the crushing sea in the least, no eddy, no swirl, no detritus, only simple, plain, indisputable nothingness.
From his back, exhausted, immobile, bloody, Kip looked up into those yawning foreign constellations. “So you are there,” he said. “Kind of take a subtle approach, don’t you?”
The cloak lay shimmering in Kip’s hand. He sat on the ground holding it, wondering what would have happened if Abaddon had shot him here. If he was practically dead anyway, what was the difference? Or was that creature lying about the whole dying-out-in-his-real-body thing? Something felt very wrong in Kip’s chest, so he thought not.
“Subtle? He’s using you.”
It was Rea Siluz. She was wearing a green-and-black jalabiya with the hood down around her neck, her halo of black hair fairly glowing. But perhaps that was just the effect of her smile. Kip thought for a moment about what she’d said, then grinned. “Rea. So, you’re some kind of librarian?” He stood, with difficulty.
She smiled again and shook her head. “Only when … time allows.”
“You’re what he is … or was, or … something?”
“I am not nearly what he was, but I am far more than he is. As are you. Evil is darkness. Darkness is the broken eye, the ever-blind unseeing. Darkness is less substantial than smoke, and even a dim mirror is brighter than the void.”
That seemed pretty deep, so naturally Kip said, “You’re not as flashy as he was.”
She laughed. “Kip, do you know how beautiful you are? You understand things with your heart. There’s a time to revel in and reveal glory earned and glory given. But vanity is show. In point of fact, I am quite well-known for my love of spectacle. Which is probably why I was drawn to you.”
“Me? I’m just a dim mirror. And I, I think I’m dying.” He thought suddenly, if you’re addressing some kind of celestial immortal, and she’s actually answering you, you should probably ask some really good questions: like about the cloak he was holding, or heck, if there really was a Lightbringer, and if so who …
He fell over. Too late. He thought that if he got through all the cards, there was supposed to be some way … out? Did he miss it? He tried to open his eyes to look for it. Nothing. Maybe they were open. Ah well. He was dead at last, but he didn’t mind.