Chapter 97
When no one answered the door at the chirurgeons’ house, Ironfist broke it down. There was no one inside. Neither the chirurgeons, nor the Blackguards, nor Gavin Guile. There was no note, no sign of a struggle.
“They’re gone,” a voice said outside, behind him. “I’ve been waiting for you.” And then Grinwoody stepped into the house.
“Grinwoody,” Ironfist said.
Grinwoody waved a hand. “That’s not necessary, not here, not today.”
“Uncle,” Ironfist said, cracking a grin. The men embraced.
“You understand there was nothing I could do about this,” Grinwoody said. He gestured to the emptiness.
“Is he alive?” Ironfist asked.
“Gavin, yes. The Blackguard who was here protecting him and the chirurgeons, no. Andross will … No, even after all these years, I don’t know what Andross will do with Gavin. Imprison him until he breaks? Kill him when Gavin disrespects him, as he inevitably will? Elevate him for some purpose? I have no idea. Still.” He said it with frustrated admiration, as of an adversary who had fought for so long and so well that they were nearly friends.
Ironfist said, “I was there, within steps of that old scorpion. I could have … Did I fail you, uncle? Did I fail my Ulta? After all this time, and how high I rose.” He expelled a great breath.
“Do you have it?”
“The White had it hidden just where you said.” Ironfist handed over the polished ziricote-wood box, no wider than his hand and only a few thumbs deep. “I found no key.”
“Your commander’s pin,” Grinwoody said. Ironfist gave it to him, and Grinwoody snapped the pin between his fingers. Ironfist flinched, but Grinwoody wasn’t done. The halves hadn’t split randomly. He took one half and stuck it into the lock. It fit.
A line around the box glowed briefly.
Grinwoody said, “Throwing away your life to kill some noble was never to be your Ulta. There were … questions about your loyalty. Questions you’ve quite answered now.” He opened the box a crack and exhaled reverently, then closed it. “They call us masters of secrecy, and yet in dazzling the eye with lying light, the Chromeria is without rival. They say you’re the Blackguard because your skin is black, because your clothes are black, because in wearing no color, you show that your allegiance is to none of the Colors. They say you are Blackguards because you surrender your own light of reason to serve as a slave, that you are like the black-robed luxiats in taking on the humility of colorlessness. They say you serve in the dark. They say a hundred things that are all true—all to obscure one, central truth: you are called the Blackguard because you guard the black. The black seed crystal. Accessible only with the cooperation of the White and the commander of the Blackguard both. It is the weapon that kills Prisms and quenches luxin. This is the tool that will rebuild the Order. This is the pen that rewrites history. This, nephew, was your Ulta. You have succeeded. You’ve done more for the Order of the Broken Eye than anyone in three centuries.”
Why then was Ironfist ashamed? Ashamed that Grinwoody hadn’t trusted him. Ashamed that for some few months, he’d thought he didn’t have to choose sides, thought that his two oaths could be fulfilled without betraying either one, that ancient enemies could be made allies as they fought a common enemy, that his Ulta might be to kill the Color Prince. He took off his ghotra. Too late for that now. Orholam had reached out to Ironfist, and Ironfist had just spat in his face. “What do we do now?” Ironfist asked, without inflection.
“How we direct all the resources of the Order hinges on your answer to one question, my nephew and my right hand: after all you’ve seen, who is Kip Guile?”
Ironfist looked at his uncle, the slave, the hidden Old Man of the Desert, the head of the Order of the Broken Eye, and he could almost see fates being written as he chose his words. “He is not Kip Delauria, bastard, that I know. Nor is he Kip Guile. He is the Breaker, he is the Lightbringer, and he is our Diakoptês come again.”
“Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”
Epilogue 1
The distant explosion’s roar raced through Big Jasper’s broad avenues and lightwells, between the arches of its Thousand Stars, past whitewashed homes and gleaming domes. The cheering throngs along the Sun Day parade route fell silent, and every eye looked to the horizon, Ironfist’s eyes first of all.
Ironfist’s bitter regrets and introspection blew away with the last echoes of the great blast, and a rippling cloud billowed upward somewhere near the docks, so intensely hot and huge that it folded in on itself like a mushroom cap. There was only one place on that side of the island that held enough black powder to make an explosion so huge. He ran.
With his height and constant training and knowledge of every back street on this island, the half league passed in no time. Crowds coming and going both slowed his pace as he reached the narrow peninsula. Promachos Andross Guile’s Lightguards were trying to set up a perimeter, and doing a predictably bad job of it.
As Ironfist approached the line—were those idiots keeping out chirurgeons?—he couldn’t help but stare at the dissipating black cloud and the rubble beneath it. The explosion had come from the cannon tower that guarded the harbor. The tower’s powder stores were sunk into its bedrock bowels so that even an invading navy’s fire couldn’t hit them. Carver Black, in charge of the island’s defenses, was meticulous in checking that appropriate discipline in storing and working around so much black powder was maintained.
Of course, with the Lightguards having taken over, those clumsy fools might have begun storing the powder above ground. A dropped lamp, an iron-nailed boot—if you let discipline slip for a heartbeat, this kind of accident could happen.
But Ironfist knew in his gut that this was no accident.
The Lightguards tried to bar him from the peninsula, but he said, “I’m Commander Ironfist, let me pass.”
He actually forgot that it wasn’t true anymore until the words were out of his mouth. He’d been commander so long, it was impossible to think of himself as anything else.
They moved immediately. So they hadn’t heard yet.
The cannon tower was still standing. Reinforced with iron and Orholam only knew what kinds of luxin, the outer walls were cracked in some places, but otherwise intact. The blast, thus contained, had shot up from the cellar through each of the five floors, hurling everything out the top, transforming the cannon tower into a cannon aimed at heaven. Everything within had been flung into the sky: broad paving stones that had made the floors, splintered wood, rags, and, nearer to the tower itself, even the massive cannons themselves.
The entry door had been blown out into the harbor, and heavy smoke roiled out of it still. Civilians and Lightguards alike surrounded the tower, looking for survivors, surveying the damage, counting the dead. Ironfist saw a corpse, legless, charred, his clothes blown entirely off him. Others bobbed in the waters. But of most of the dead, there was almost nothing left. A boot here, a piece of meat unidentifiable there. Blood smears.
Ironfist found a corpse, dead not from the explosion, but of a slash through the neck. It could have been from flying shrapnel, but the man had no burn marks or evidence of injury from the concussion wave. He’d been lying here when the explosion happened, already dead.
That meant sabotage. Ironfist looked to the horizon. Was there a fleet out there? No. And they’d have had warning if there was. Why this target, then? Surely the Color Prince wouldn’t spend lives and treasure blowing up a tower for no reason.
A yell sounded from a knot of Lightguards at the water’s edge. Ironfist made his way over there as they pulled the man from the waves. The man was Parian, tall, hugely muscular, and wearing only dark trousers, his tunic lost, his headscarf lost. It was his brother.
Tremblefist. Dear Orholam, no. Ironfist’s heart stopped. It couldn’t—it couldn’t … And yet there was no mistaking that imposing figure, the smaller twin of Ironfist’s own body.
“He’s alive!” someone shouted.
Ironfist crashed the lines of gawking Lightguards. “Away!” he roared. “That’s my brother! Move!”
And then, with no time intervening, he was holding his brother in his arms. He must have been convincing, because everyone had moved back a good ten paces.
It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. Tremblefist’s body bore no wounds that Ironfist could see, but when his eyelids fluttered open, the whites of his eyes were bloodshot almost pure red. If he had that kind of damage to his head …
No. Ironfist didn’t want to believe what his experience knew.
“Harrdun,” his brother said, looking up at him.
“Hanishu.” They had barely spoken each other’s birth names in all the days since they’d taken their Blackguard names, there was so much pride in the latter names, and so much pain in the former.
“You should have seen me fight,” Hanishu said. “Twenty-seven men. In less than a minute. Not a scratch on me. They even used … mmmm. Used muskets. Orholam forgave me, Harrdun. For Aghbalu. His holy breath was on me in this fight. I made it through the whole tower.”
Ironfist was still trying to recover, the words clanged against each other like a cacophony of pots and pans. “You did this?” he whispered tensely. “I thought maybe an attack by the Color—”
“I saved the Lightbringer. They were going to sink his ship.” He found Ironfist’s hand and clasped it. “I made it to the cellars. Set the fuse, ran. But they’d locked the door out. So I climbed the entire tower, fighting, jumped off the top just as she blew. Landed it. One for the ages. Surfaced, was swimming back to shore, and a damn rock fell out of the sky. Had no idea they’d be in the air that long … I’m all busted inside.”
From his eyes, he hadn’t made the jump quite as clearly as he seemed to think. But blows to the head could skew everything. And it didn’t matter, did it?
“Not long now,” Hanishu said. “Got a question, big brother.”
“Anything,” Ironfist said.
“Not for me. For you. Will take a while to answer.”
“What is it?”
“Before you left home to come here, you met with some people. You made them an oath.”
“What people?” But Ironfist knew, and his heart sank again that Tremblefist knew about that.
“I didn’t want to come to the Chromeria, you know, after what I did at Aghbalu. But I came for you. Seeing you swear yourself to the Order, it, it wouldn’t leave me. I would have happily killed myself, but I couldn’t go while you were in danger. Funny thing. Coming here to save you is what saved me. I came so that someday, when your soul was on the line, and you had to decide which oaths to keep, that I would be here for you. I’m not going to make it, big brother. All that effort, all this time…” And he began weeping. “I failed you.”
As if the failure were his.
There was nothing to say, no way to combat the tears spilling freely down Ironfist’s cheeks.
Tremblefist said, “After the fall of Ru, the others told me how you prayed. It had to be the first time you prayed since mother was killed, huh?”
Ironfist nodded tightly.
“And he answered.”
“He did.” A miracle cannon shot, five thousand paces, to save friends he might be called on to kill.
“So you’ve taken unbreakable oaths to implacable enemies. One to the Bearer of Light, and one to the Maker of it. So you have to decide without me, brother. Which man are you?”
Ironfist had no answer. He clung for comfort to the brother he should be comforting. Like his life, Tremblefist’s death wasn’t easy.