The Blinding Knife

Chapter 58

“Breaker, huh?” Andross Guile said, sardonic. “I feel like I’m being visited by a high personage.”

“And I feel like I’m visiting a bitter, hateful old man. Oh.” Kip sat down in his chair opposite the old man.

Andross laughed. “So, Breaker, does your little friend Adrasteia know that we’re playing for her future right now?”

“No.”

“And which will you break, her heart or her maidenhead? Ha-ha! Mmm. You play like a failure, Kip. Do you know why you didn’t tell her? Because you thought that if you lost, whatever happens to her could just be a tragedy that you could pretend you had nothing to do with. You didn’t want her to hate you if you lost. Poor Kip. Poor orphan boy of a haze-addled mother.”

“Shut up and play,” Kip said.

“Kip the Lip. You never know when to stop, do you? Lean forward, lard boy.”

He obeyed. The blind man groped, found his face, and slapped him heavily.

Kip accepted the blow. There was something purifying in pain. He was a madman. He spat bloody penance on Lord Guile’s floor. Kip the Lip. Ramir had called him that, mocked him.

“Boy, your defiance is inspiring, but be aware that I set the rules, and I have no compunction about changing those when I please. You think you have nothing to lose? Fool. Don’t vaunt until you’ve won, don’t scream defiance until you’ve lost.”

“Well then, I hope you’ll accept my vaunting in about half an hour.”

Andross said, “Let’s get to it, then. Best two of three. Which deck would you like today? I’ll be taking the red.” He gestured. He had white and yellow decks set out for Kip.

“I’ll pass,” Kip said.

Thin eyebrows appeared briefly over the top of Andross Guile’s huge dark spectacles. “Ah, your own deck? Show it to me.”

“They’ve got the blind man’s marks,” Kip said. “Here.” He handed over only one card.

Andross rubbed the corner where the marks were, as if looking for a reason to reject it, but it was perfect work. Janus Borig wouldn’t do less.

Kip half expected the old man to tell him he couldn’t use other cards. It was a rule that had never been addressed.

“If any of the cards don’t have the marks, I’ll reject the entire deck, and you lose, understood?” Andross said.

“Understood.”

“Wondered how long it would be before you finally made your own deck,” Andross said. “Slower than I thought you’d be.”

“Mm-hmm,” Kip said. The insult meant nothing, not in the same breath as the much larger victory of being allowed to use his own deck. “Me first?” Hoping that the old man would contradict him and go first.

Indulgent smile. “Be my guest.”

So Kip set the field of play to outside. Outside made it harder to control the light, which was usually a good call against red. So many of the sources of light indoors were torches or fires-light sources that gave yellow and red and sub-red easily-that it was harder for greens and blues to source their spells.

But Kip going first meant Andross got to draw an extra card.

They established the area quickly, the art on the cards giving them an imaginary space-outside the red walls of a castle. Grass, forest. Blue sky, of course. These were the sources. Either could draft from them, but Kip was on the forest side, so he could draft more quickly from it, powering his green drafting quicker, while the converse was true for Andross and the red walls.

Now that Kip knew the rules, Andross played a fast variant of the game. There were two tiny sand clocks, five seconds each. Absent the visual cues of seeing the grains drain through, the luxlord had a fantastically worked model that rang a bell each time a player ran out of time. If you didn’t play during your five seconds, you lost your turn. As he liked to say, in real life, drafters fought each other simultaneously, each drafting as quickly as they could, deciding on the fly what to do, making mistakes.

Andross Guile’s blindness was the one huge advantage Kip had. He could see his opponent’s card as soon as it was turned over, where Andross had to reach across the table and feel for his. Kip put his new card in the same place every time so that the handicap was as little of one as possible, but it was still at least a second per turn extra that he had. And Andross had to remember everything on the play field.

In the normal variant, turns were taken in a leisurely fashion with no clocks, but Andross despised it, said it taught nothing. Life and death and drafting were fast, he said. The sands of our lives are always pouring out, always too fast.

“Ominous name,” Andross said. The first few moves never took too much concentration.

“What’s that?” Kip asked, trying to decide whether to spend his turn establishing more colors in the field or putting on his spectacles.

“Breaker.”

Spectacles. He didn’t want to be unarmed for any longer than absolutely necessary. “Ominous how?”

“You didn’t put him up to it? Here I was giving you credit for doing that behind the scenes. Clever move, I thought.”

Clever move? Apparently Kip’s silence spoke for him.

“You’d have me believe you getting that name was a coincidence?”

“What’re the two things that are coinciding?” Kip asked.

“Breaker’s one of the epithets the prophecies apply to the Lightbringer.”

“It was a joke. I broke a chair.”

“Funny,” Andross said, tone flat.

“And I broke a boy’s nose. And a bit of drafting someone was doing.”

The Lightbringer? Something in Kip’s soul soared at the very thought. He was distracted by talking and almost missed his turn. He played quickly, putting Damien Savoss on the field and flipping Andross Guile’s clock.

Oh hell. That was one of the forbidden cards. Kip had meant to hold on to those for another couple of turns.

Andross ran his fingers over the marks. Hesitated. Ran his fingers over the marks again. “This is Damien Savoss,” he said. “This card is illegal.” He was one to talk.

“Illegal to possess,” Kip said quickly, “but the justiciars of the game never declared them illegal to play.” He flipped his sand clock over.

“A fine distinction.”

“A fine distinction? I only learned about the black cards because you play with them!”

“Some of the black cards were withdrawn, others were outlawed — ” The bell rang, signaling the end of Andross Guile’s turn.

Kip played another card quickly, cementing the luxlord’s missed turn.

Rage washed over Andross Guile’s face. The loose flesh below his jawline quivered. But he said nothing. He played.

In five minutes, Kip won. The additional turn and the surprise of playing against cards he hadn’t seen in more than a decade threw off Andross Guile’s game. Still, it seemed like the man played defensively. Unusual.

“It was a good trick,” Andross said afterward, while they shuffled their decks. “You shouldn’t have wasted it on the girl. That’s the kind of trick that only works once. You should have seen if you could beat me once, and then played that deck for the tiebreaker if you couldn’t. Beyond that, you should have waited until your own future was in jeopardy, not spent it on a slave girl. Foolish.”

Kip turned to Grinwoody. “Some water, please.” He forgot again that you don’t say please to a slave. He was always forgetting that.

But the water wasn’t the point. Kip had figured out that the big spectacles Grinwoody wore somehow allowed him to see in the darkness. With them, Grinwoody was Andross’s eyes. As soon as the old slave turned to grab the pitcher, Kip brought the other deck out of his pocket quietly, speaking to cover the noise of it. “There’s a thousand things you could teach me, Luxlord Guile. You’re brilliant and experienced. But right now you’re my enemy, and you’re trying to inflict horrors on someone who is dear to me. So I’ll keep my own counsel, thanks.”

Lord Guile’s face cleared. “You are learning, aren’t you? Ignorant, naive, but not altogether as stupid as I thought. I know you may not believe this, Kip, but I actually like you. A little. How’s your hand?”

It took Kip a moment to understand he didn’t mean his cards, he actually meant his hand. “Better.” His fingers still wouldn’t straighten all the way, but his grip was strong, and he was working on them.

Andross Guile made some noncommittal noise and picked up the yellow deck that he’d set out for Kip earlier. He opened a box off to one side, grabbed out a few cards, took some out of the deck, and shuffled the new ones in. You were allowed to switch or modify your deck between rounds, to adapt to your opponent’s strategies. “So have you thought about it? Most boys do, eventually.”

“Thought about what?” Kip asked. The old man started speaking about whatever he was thinking of at times, not bothering to connect them for his listener.

“Whether you’re the Lightbringer, of course.” There was a savage, amused edge to Andross Guile’s tone, like he was juggling fire and throwing it to Kip still burning.

“No,” Kip said. Something in him seized up. “Let’s play.”

“He’s supposed to be of mysterious birth, and yours is at least dubious-which could be close enough.”

Kip flushed. “Your turn,” he said.

“The old word that says he’ll be a ‘great’ man from his youth could be a pun in the original Parian-another meaning of the word ‘great’ is ‘rotund.’ Which… well.”

Die, you old cancer. “Your turn,” Kip said.

“But I am moving, don’t you see?” Andross asked. “When the Lightbringer comes, he’s going to upend everything. Anyone who has wealth, position, or power will fear him because he could take it all away. But everyone who doesn’t have any of those will love him, hoping he’ll give all that to them. So what part will you play, Kip? Garden.”

Garden? Oh, he was declaring the setting.

Kip drew-and got lucky. A hand full of time control cards.

Using his first turns to gather the light he needed in various colors, he appeared to do nothing.

Andross played a Superchromat, a powerful card for a yellow deck, meaning his spells wouldn’t fail, and then he drafted a yellow sword, which took two rounds, one to draft it and one to solidify it.

By the time Kip played Panic, the old man’s lips were pursed. He wasn’t aware of any green deck that used the strategy Kip was employing. Andross’s five-second sand clocks were swapped out for four-second clocks.

And the pleasure of playing a Panic on the cold old man, who had probably never panicked in his entire life, was a joyous dagger-twist.

Andross attacked, and Kip didn’t even try to stop it. It took off nearly half his life.

Kip played another Panic. Four-second sand clocks were replaced with three-second clocks.

It was, of course, a completely unfair strategy. It already took the blind man at least an additional second longer than a sighted man to tell what the card played was, and three seconds was no time to come up with any sort of good tactics.

He attacked again and took Kip within a hair’s breadth of death. Then Kip followed up with a few weak attacks, barely staying alive. Between his own draw, reading his own card, and reading Kip’s, Andross had no time at all.

Kip Disarmed him, playing his own cards as quickly as he could to deprive Andross of as much of his time as possible. Within five more turns, by a hundred weakling cuts, he’d killed the old man.

Andross’s fist crashed onto the tabletop and he swept the sand clocks off the table, smashing several against the wall. He balled his hands and his fists shook.

“Give me your deck,” he said, barely leashing his rage.

“It’s on the table. In front of you,” Kip said. His voice sounded thready and tight. Some dim part of him wondered why he was so terrified of an old, infirm man, but he was.

Andross went through the deck with surprising speed, given his blindness. “You switched decks,” he said. “Grinwoody?”

“My lord, I didn’t see him do it. It was my failure.”

Andross screamed, voice raw, “I know it was your failure!” Kip was suddenly intensely aware that Andross Guile was the Red. He’d been using red luxin for twice as long as Kip had been alive. The darkness of the room was to keep Andross from becoming a color wight-and the man might be very, very close to the line. “Out, bastard! Out!”

Kip sat very still. Licked his lips.

“I said, out!” Andross roared.

Kip cowered. Very quietly and respectfully, he said, “I need Teia’s writ, my lord. And my deck. Please.”

Andross snarled and flung Kip’s deck in his face. He whirled and stormed to his bedchamber. He paused at the open door, but didn’t turn his back. “Grinwoody!” he barked.

“Yes, my lord,” the slave said. After their years together, the little man was able to discern exactly what the Red wanted from the barest modulation of his voice.

The door slammed behind Andross, and Kip picked up his scattered cards. Grinwoody brought forth a sheaf of papers and Andross Guile’s seal.

“Mother’s name?” Grinwoody asked, voice low.

“Katalina.”

“Full name.”

“Katalina Delauria.” Grinwoody nodded, as if he knew it all along and was merely receiving confirmation. Kip was dimly aware that even in this loss, Andross Guile was getting some information out of him. Kip had no idea what the information was good for, but he knew the spider was spinning silken snares with every breath.

Grinwoody filled out the forms, affixed the seal, and handed them to Kip. There was a brown stain on the papers. Blood? “Turn these in to the head scribe in the Prism’s Tower. And congratulations, you’re now the owner of a young slave girl. Enjoy.”