The Blinding Knife

Chapter 88

“I heard that the wights are using hellhounds,” Ferkudi said. “In Atash.”

“And I heard the Eternal Flame in Aslal burned bright blue for two months straight!” Yugerten said. He was a gangly boy, and ranked low. No one paid much attention to him.

“Anyone can make a fire burn blue,” Ferkudi said. “I’m talking hellhounds!”

The scrubs were walking together as a class to go do another real-world training. They didn’t know any of the details yet, but after oversleeping, Kip had barely caught up with them before they got to the really bad neighborhoods.

“Burning dogs, made of luxin?” Teia asked dubiously.

Kip was trying to see who was watching them as they walked through increasingly narrow streets to Overhill.

“Hellhounds are a myth, Ferk,” Tanner said.

“The man who told me wouldn’t lie,” Ferkudi said.

“Think, you moron, you’re a drafter,” Tanner said. “How would you even do such a thing? You could make a statue of a dog out of red luxin, but it wouldn’t do anything, would it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess not,” Ferkudi said.

“They’re not made of luxin,” a voice interjected quietly. “But they are real.”

It was Trainer Fisk.

The boys fell silent, looked at each other.

“The wights infuse red luxin into the coat and skin of a dog. They do it for practice, before they try it on themselves. It’s a cruel, cruel thing, and worse is to set them on fire. But I’ve seen it happen. I saw Commander Ironfist put one down when we were cleaning up the wights from the False Prism’s War.”

Their respect for Commander Ironfist jumped up a few more rungs on the ladder to pure worship.

“But wouldn’t a dog who’d been set on fire be just as likely to kill the men who sent it as that man’s enemies?” Kip asked. “I’d think it would just go crazy.”

Trainer Fisk spat. “Dammit, Breaker. It would be you, wouldn’t it?”

“What?” Kip asked. He still wasn’t used to being called Breaker.

But the trainer said nothing as they entered a small square and passed dirty merchants who stared at them with open hostility. This was a Tyrean neighborhood, but the people here didn’t see a Tyrean when they looked at Kip, they saw only a Blackguard whelp.

When they’d passed out of the square and into the next street, Trainer Fisk said, “There’s kinds of drafting we don’t talk about much with younger drafters, because we lose enough of you as it is, and everyone thinks she’s special and tries the things that we tell you not to try. But you all are going to be warriors, and maybe sooner than we’d like, so you deserve to know what’s out there.”

If he hadn’t had everyone’s attention before, he did now. The class bunched around him, hanging on every word.

“Breaker’s right. You light a dog on fire, it’ll go crazy. But drafting is about Will. You know that we use Will for everything we draft, that Will can cover over mistakes we make in matching wavelengths. Lots of theories as to how it really works, but basically, you can infuse your own Will in your work.”

“Golems?” someone said.

Trainer Fisk grimaced. “Are almost impossible.” He looked like he was sorry he’d started down this road. He looked at the girl who’d said it. “You’re a blue monochrome, Tamerah. If you made a golem, it would just sit there in its harmonious blue-ness. A green golem would be totally uncontrollable, as has been demonstrated scores of times. They reject rules and control to the extent that they kill the foolish drafters who create them. So you have to be at least a bichrome to even attempt a golem, and they pretty much always go horribly wrong. Point is, for the question at hand, you can cast your will onto a living creature-in this case dogs. Usually those who’ve broken the halo-or plan to do so-will experiment on animals first to see how they might successfully change their own bodies. Hellhounds are one permutation of that.”

“Permutation?” someone asked.

“Version!” Ferkudi said. “And shut up.”

Trainer Fisk went on, reluctantly. “Infuse a dog with lots of red luxin, send enough Will into it to make it run at your enemies, and light it on fire. It’s a sick and horrible way to die. They howl in pain and rage, impelled to attack even when they’re so far consumed by the flames that you can’t believe they’re still moving. If you ever have to face one, take the legs off first, and then the head. That usually does it.”

“Usually?” Ferkudi said, astounded.

“Enough of that,” Trainer Fisk said. “Today, we’re inviting trouble. As before, know that some of you may not come back from today’s exercise. Of those who do, some of you may come back maimed. You may be knocked out of the Blackguard before you even get in, scrubs, and through no fault of your own.”

It was like being dunked in cold water. The levity and wonder of the moment before was dashed.

“We can expect that the gangs have heard about the exercise the other week, and we can expect that they’re looking forward to having another shot at you. Here’s the setup: the top two teams will be teams of six. Five of you are Blackguards, one of you is a Color. The bottom team will be nine. As always, it is hard to stay on top. Those of you who are Blackguards are not allowed to draft. Your Color is allowed to draft but not allowed to fight. The Color will be carrying a purse with forty danars in it. Enough to attract some serious problems for you, but not enough to start a riot. We hope. The older classes and several full Blackguards will be along the route. If you need help, you call out for it, and they’ll come. If you call for help, you fail and everyone in your team drops three places, but being a Blackguard means knowing when to beat a retreat. You start from here, the test is over when you cross the Lily’s Stem. Got it?”

The scrubs nodded.

“First up, Teia and Kip, Cruxer and Lucia, Aram and Erato. Kip, you’re the Color.”

“Why does Kip get to be the Color?” Aram asked. Little bastard.

Trainer Fisk’s jaw tightened for a fraction of a second, then he said, “Because Kip’s slow. Our current Prism notwithstanding, usually the man or woman you guard is older, slower, and a worse fighter than you are. Part of what we do is deal with that, and protect them despite their weaknesses. That good enough, Aram, or do I need to explain myself to you further?”

Aram scowled, looking away.

It wasn’t a bad team, Kip thought. Out of the twenty-one scrubs still left, Cruxer was first place, Teia was seventh place, Aram was eleventh but deserved to be in the top five, and Erato was ninth but deserved to be about fifteenth. Kip was fifteenth-and deserved to be about twenty-third-but that was neither here nor there. Cruxer’s partner, Lucia, was ranked twenty-first. She was smart, pretty, and well liked, with short wiry hair and a heart-stopping smile, but not much of a fighter. No killer instinct. No matter how much extra training Cruxer did with her, she was probably going to fail out in the final test next week.

“Kip,” Cruxer said. “You have any advice?”

Kip looked at Cruxer, shocked for a moment. Cruxer was a thousand times the man Kip was, and he was asking Kip for advice?

“ ’Course he doesn’t. Just cause he’s Guile’s get doesn’t mean he’s got half the brain his father does,” Aram said.

“Head three blocks north and five blocks up, and go from there,” Kip said quickly, flushing.

Cruxer said, “That’s not exactly a straight route, Kip.”

“Not straight? It’s about as crooked as it could be,” Erato threw in. “I don’t want to be in these slums any longer than I have to.”

Trainer Fisk handed Kip the coin purse. “Go when you’re ready,” he said.

All of the approaches to this little wide spot between the houses and the wall were dark and narrow. There were men down every way, and no way to tell which curious eyes were hostile. Kip didn’t see children, and there were few women. He guessed that meant the people here knew trouble was coming.

“Let’s go,” Aram said. “Straight south and we can cut to the main streets in just a few blocks. Come on!”

“It’s not the distance that’s the problem,” Kip said.

“Kip, you gotta give me a better reason than that,” Cruxer said. “We’ve gotta move. The longer we wait, the more time we’re giving-”

“They’re right, Kip,” Teia said. “We only have to run a few blocks.”

“I’m with Aram,” Cruxer said. “Let’s go! Wedge formation, don’t let anyone within arm’s length of Kip!”

They pulled Kip into a jog, and then suddenly he stopped.

“I’m the Color,” he said.

“No shit,” Aram said. “So stop making yourself an easy target!”

They all skidded to a halt, eyes skipping from the men in the alleys ahead of them and going to Kip, who was acting insane.

“You’re protecting me,” Kip said.

“We’ve established that. Two blocks, two!” Cruxer said.

“We could carry him,” Lucia said.

“We’d give up two fighters to do that, at least.”

Kip was the Color. They were his guards. They had to protect him. It was that simple. It wasn’t a matter of who was the best, or smartest, or who had the highest rank, it was a matter of who was in control. And that was Kip. He was not only in control, he was right.

So he turned and ran the other direction.

More than one oath followed him-words hot enough to blister his ears-but he wasn’t listening. In moments, they had surrounded him once more. They jogged past a puzzled-looking Trainer Fisk and the rest of the scrubs.

“It’s the gangs,” Kip said as they caught up with him. “We’ve got the Tyrean gangs to worry about first. We cut north three blocks, and we’ll cross into Ilytian neighborhoods. Then we cut over into the markets, where the guards don’t care where you’re from, they don’t want big armed gangs coming through regardless. We skip back and forth between gang territories, and they have to worry about each other instead of about us.” He huffed. It was hard to talk while running. “Cruxer, give me your spectacles!”

The older boy handed him his blue spectacles. Kip held his own green spectacles up to his eyes first, and stared at the whitewashed buildings. Filling halfway up, he pressed that luxin into his right side, and drew in blue luxin and held it in his left arm.

He wasn’t prepared for what it did to him. The calming, cool rationality of blue hit the wild restlessness of green like cavalry lines crashing together.

“Cruxer, you lead, you take it,” Kip said. He was blinking rapidly, shaking his head. His temples were knotting up, an instant headache blossoming, radiating down his neck. With an effort of will, he tried to separate the luxins within him.

The alley ahead darkened as five men suddenly appeared, blocking it. They were armed with clubs and chains. The scrubs crowded ahead of Kip, blocking his firing lanes.

“Move or it’s on your own heads!” Cruxer shouted. He didn’t slow. The thugs blocking the alley didn’t move.

“One and two!” Cruxer shouted, calling out his targets.

“Four!” Lucia said.

“Three!” Aram said.

“Five!” Teia said.

Which, of course, left Kip doing nothing.

One was the biggest, a fat, hairy brute who took up the center of the alley. He stood flat-footed, head-on, certain that these children would slow down. He must have weighed at least twice as much as Kip. He raised his club.

Cruxer sped up at the last second, turning to do a slippery side kick, left foot crossing behind his right, and then his right stabbing out with incredible force. It was a hard kick to do quickly when standing still, but its power was without equal. Kip had never seen anyone even try it when running.

But the kick was beautiful. It caught the fat man in the center of his chest and lifted his entire flabby mass off the ground, blasting him backward as if he’d been hit by a cannon blast of grapeshot. His descending club went spinning harmlessly away, and Cruxer was already uncoiling again. A spinning back kick, effortlessly high, his heel crashing across the neck of number two-who went down in a heap, smacking himself with his own chain.

Teia slowed down from her run before reaching her skinny opponent, but she acted almost as quickly, feigning a punch at the man’s face, then kicking him in the groin. As he hunched over instinctively from the pain, his face met her rising knee with explosive results.

Lucia tried to engage her own target, but that man was more worried about Cruxer. Cruxer caught the man’s descending club in an X block, brought his hands down to grab the man. But the thug snatched his hands back too quickly, barely holding on to the club.

It didn’t matter. Cruxer connected one of his shin-strikes across the man’s leg. The man went down, howling. Cruxer was on top of him in a moment, standing with one foot trapping the man’s foot, and his other foot on the man’s knee. He could cripple him in an instant just by shifting his weight.

Instead, Cruxer looked over to the rest of them. Kip hadn’t even seen how Aram had dealt with his opponent, but the man was down. None of the others looked like they were going to put up any more fight.

Cruxer grinned, wild, elated, charming. It was the look of a boy who can’t believe that all of his training actually works. That he is become what he has always hoped to be. It was, Kip knew, an innocent look. He felt a gulf open between him and the older boy. Cruxer was a warrior-in-training, but he wasn’t a warrior yet. Cruxer would be an excellent warrior, but he was also a good man. He wouldn’t lose his excellence, but he would lose this joy when he saw heads explode, when he watched friends try to hold in their life’s blood as it pumped out of their guts, when he listened to his enemies whimpering and shivering as they died too slowly.

“Let’s go!” Cruxer said. “Lucia, you guard the back next time.”

“Give me shooting lanes next time,” Kip said. “I’ve got luxin.”

They ran on. Kip was getting tired, but he realized that just a few months ago he wouldn’t even have been able to jog this far. Now he was keeping up with the others. He’d still be the first to tire, and the first to quit, but he wasn’t quitting yet.

On the next block, they caught sight of a group of maybe a dozen men, trying to cut them off, and then stopping and cursing as the squad crossed into the Ilytian neighborhood.

Incredibly, they crossed through the Ilytian area with no trouble. Kip could only guess that the gangs here hadn’t heard about them yet.

They didn’t cross through the market, though. Kip hadn’t realized how formidable his own group looked: the guards whom he’d thought would be unhappy to see an armed gang were definitely unhappy to see Kip and his friends. So Cruxer turned them south again.

“Men following,” Lucia said. “Five or six of ’em. Seventy paces back.”

Kip looked, and immediately felt dumb for doing it. Now they knew he knew. Stupid!

“Kip? You know this neighborhood?” Cruxer asked.

“Sorry.”

“Anyone?” Cruxer asked. “If so, talk quick. I’m not feeling so great about this.”

“I’ve been here,” Aram said. “I think I can-Follow me.”

He led them for several blessedly uneventful blocks, and Kip started to think they might make it back without any more fights.

Then they rounded a corner. What had looked like it would lead to an open, wide street was gated and chained. There was only the narrow street they’d entered from, and one alley out of the wide space between houses. In the alley, there had to be twenty men. Aram swore.

“Anyone feel like dropping three spots?” Kip asked.

No one answered. That was a no. Not this close to the final test. They’d take a beating if they had to, but none of them was going to just give up.

Kip stepped forward. He braced his feet.

“Semicircle,” Cruxer said. “I got point. Kip, you stand on that rock, you should be able to keep drafting while we fight. The rest of us, don’t let anyone into the middle of our semicircle.”

They formed up as Kip gathered his will. The men in the alley were jogging forward now, constrained in the tight space. Kip didn’t know what he was going to do until he was already drafting the big green ball into his fist. It was stupid. If he’d had the practicum, there would be a hundred different things he could do that would work better-but he hadn’t. He knew how to do this. Fine. He was the ignorant boy from Tyrea who didn’t know any better. He’d show them.

The ball swelled bigger than his head and Kip threw his hands forward with a yell.

The green luxin ball shot out at chest level at great speed. For once, Kip didn’t fall on his butt from the recoil. In the confines of the alley, the men didn’t have anywhere to dodge. The ball glanced off a man in the front row and then ricocheted back and forth. Five or ten went down as the rest surged into the open space.

Kip extended his other hand, gathering the blue into a spear point, ready to shoot it through the men.

You can’t kill them! The blue rationality cut through the wildness, and Kip hesitated. He almost lost his concentration and the blue completely, but recovered. Pop, pop, pop! He shot little blue balls at the charging men, low, at their legs. One man tried to jump the projectile, got tripped in midair and landed on his face. Others took them in the knees, and the balls shattered, shooting glassine shrapnel through their clothing.

It was too much for simple street thugs. Even as they got into the range where Kip’s drafting would be useless and their own numbers would give them the victory, the charge faltered. The thugs fled, not even pausing to help their injured.

Kip hurriedly put on his green spectacles-stupid! He’d forgotten to put them on before the fight! — and drew in more green. He drafted another green ball into his hands and just held it there, trying to look threatening.

The injured pulled themselves to their feet and followed after their comrades, but down the alley in the dark half-light between buildings, Kip saw one thin figure standing alone, lifting something, peering around the wounded men staggering through the alley.

“Kip,” Lucia said, clapping him on the shoulder. She was grinning, impish, delighted. “You were amazing! That was the best-”

From the alley, the briefest flash, a puff of white smoke lit from behind as Lucia stepped into Kip’s line of sight.

Something warm splashed over Kip’s face, blotted out his vision. He lost the green. Lucia fell into him heavily, but even as she hit him-in that fraction of a second-he knew something was terribly wrong.

They fell together. Kip caught her and she lay in his arms, half of her neck torn out by the musket ball, her body not yet aware death was a foregone conclusion, pumping blood, blood, blood.

They didn’t move. Someone shrieked. For once, even Cruxer didn’t know what to do. Desperately, he pulled Lucia out of Kip’s arms and held her himself.

Within two minutes, the Blackguards arrived. Then it was orders, investigation, questions that Kip answered numbly. Blackguards armed with the thinnest description ran to see if they could apprehend the murderer. Kip stood, dazed. Someone had given him a towel and rubbed much of the blood off his face. He was still holding that bloody towel, limply, standing, not knowing what to do with himself.

He looked at Cruxer, still cradling Lucia’s body, weeping, and he knew that the boy had been in love with her.

Orholam have mercy.

Kip couldn’t stop thinking the stupidest thing: I didn’t even hear the shot. I didn’t even hear it.