The Blinding Knife

Chapter 96

Gavin headed down to his own room. He spied his father coming up the lift just as he stepped into his room. Good thing the old bastard was blind. Grinwoody was with him, but the old slave had his back turned, helping the old man out of the lift.

Karris lay on his bed, asleep. In a chair beside the bed, Commander Ironfist sat. He rubbed his temples, and then his bald head as Gavin came in.

“Commander,” Gavin said.

“Lord Prism.” There was something oddly distant in the big man’s voice.

“Is something the matter?” Gavin asked.

Ironfist looked at him levelly. “I almost lost one of my watch captains, one of my friends, in what appears to be a targeted attack. And someone murdered one of my students yesterday. A couple of the scrubs swear that the man was aiming at Kip and the girl stepped into the line of fire on accident. Do you have any comment, Lord Prism?”

“Can I trust you enough to bare my throat to you, Ironfist?”

Ironfist hesitated, as well he should.

“Well then,” Gavin said.

Ironfist heaved a sigh and looked down at his hands. “We’re doomed, aren’t we?”

Gavin didn’t follow. They were doomed because they didn’t trust each other?

“The Chromeria is a lightning-struck tree. Still standing, but dead on the inside. That’s why we’re going to lose, I think,” Ironfist said. “We have all the power in the world, but our faith is dead. If we don’t believe in what we’re doing for its own sake, we’re just doing it to maintain power. And I think some of us are too good to continue throwing lives into the trough simply to feed the beast.”

“Are we?” Gavin asked very quietly.

“When Ru falls, this will become a real war. And once it’s a real war, and not simply an uprising of a few disgruntled madmen, then the questions begin. At some point, every one of us will have to ask if we’re on the right side. If we’ve already decided our own side is wrong-that there’s no Orholam, that the Chromeria is simply making the best of a bad situation-then where do men looking for certainty turn?”

“Maybe men shouldn’t look for certainty,” Gavin said.

“Should. Shouldn’t. Doesn’t matter. They do.”

He was right. Of course he was.

Gavin quirked an eyebrow. “Why Ironfist, are you asking me to come back to religion?”

Ironfist met his levity with a flat stare. “My own faith is dead, Lord Prism. Not least because of you. I’d not ask you to embrace a lie, but I want my people to have a reason to die. I won’t lie either. I can’t tell them what we do matters. If that’s beside the point, if you want us to die because it’s our duty to die, I can accept that. That can be enough for me. That will be enough for the Blackguard. It won’t be enough for everyone else.”

“Does the Blackguard love me so much?” Gavin asked grimly.

Ironfist looked startled Gavin should ask. “We don’t die for you. We die for each other, for our brothers and sisters. We die for the Blackguard.” Then he grinned. “Looks the same from your side though, I suppose.” Ironfist stood, looked at Karris, swallowed, then turned back to Gavin. “You should give her a ring, you know. Especially if you’re going off to your death.”

Of course. And he should make sure she was provided for, should he die. Damn.

Ironfist left, and Gavin followed him. Gavin got off at the level of his father’s and mother’s apartments, nodding amiably to the discipulae who passed him in the lift, on their way to do chores. He went into his mother’s apartments.

He’d thought he’d accepted his mother’s death, but going into her room and smelling the familiar, comforting smells of the place made him pause, barely inside the door. There was the wood polish, the waft of lavender, the stargazer lilies he’d always hated, a bit of orange, and spices he could never place. All that was missing was the smell of her perfume. A lump grew in his throat, threatening to choke him, making it hard to breathe.

“Oh, mother, I finally did it. I finally did the right thing with Karris. I wish you could see it.”

“My lord?” a timorous voice intruded. “I’m so sorry, my lord. Should I withdraw?”

It was his mother’s room slave. Gavin didn’t even know the young girl’s name. Different girl than last time. No wonder the room was immaculately clean, without even dust on the mantelpiece.

“ Caleen,” Gavin said. “You’ve done well. It’s beautiful. It reminds me powerfully of her.”

“I’m so sorry, my lord.” She buried her face.

Gavin shook his head. The girl was young. His mother had always trained her help exquisitely, and had chosen only intelligent slaves, preferring that over physical beauty, unlike other leading families. But there are some situations you don’t get around to training a fourteen-year-old girl for.

“Did my mother leave no instructions for you?” Gavin asked. Usually, like himself, his mother had kept at least half a dozen slaves in her household. She’d trimmed back in recent years, mostly manumitting those who’d provided long years of good service. Now Gavin knew why.

“She told me…” The girl blanched, then bulled forward. “She told me she was giving orders for my manumission to Grinwoody, seeing as how a slave can’t deliver her own manumission to the records keepers. I hain’t-your pardon, my lord-I haven’t heard anything since then.”

“You old bastard,” Gavin whispered to himself. His father was still denying that his wife was dead, so he’d simply ignored the girl. The girl had been stuck here for four months, with nothing to do but dust the room and get fresh flowers and hope. “Did she leave you a letter?” Gavin asked.

“Yes, my lord,” the girl said, her voice was barely a whisper, obviously picking up on Gavin’s pique. “Believe Grinwoody put it in the lord’s chamber.”

“Of course he did.” And they wouldn’t appreciate Gavin breaking into his room.

But you know what? To the everlasting night with them. Gavin was more than half convinced that his father had orchestrated Karris’s beating. The attempted murder of Kip seemed too heavy-handed, but at this point he wasn’t going to excuse his father preemptively for anything.

Look to what you love indeed.

Gavin headed across the hall, drafted red luxin into the lock, jimmied it until he felt tumblers loosen, and then injected yellow luxin, steeled his will, and twisted. The lock clicked open.

He might be half dead, but he wasn’t neutered yet, thanks. He set a light to burning, casting a pale yellow glare through the Red’s rooms. He went to the desk, rifled through the papers. Andross Guile was upstairs, and a council of war would surely take hours, even for a man as ignorant of war as his own father. Andross seemed to think that being brilliant meant being good at everything, and his generals would have to fill in the gaps in his knowledge carefully and slowly, lest they infuriate the old man. Considering how ignorant they themselves were, it ought to take a while.

It was almost comical how much excellent intelligence his father had left in the open. Gavin wished he’d come in merely to poke around. Andross was simply here so often that he clearly never thought about the danger of someone coming into his rooms while he was gone. He was never gone.

Gavin found the note about the slave girl quickly. His mother’s handwriting was on the outside, a beautiful looping script that she hadn’t lost even as age advanced on her.

We drafters are robbed of life before age can rob us of our faculties. Gavin didn’t know if it was the greatest cruelty of all, or a small kindness. He glanced at the letter. It was as the girl had said, a simple, straightforward manumission, and a grant of four hundred danars. The girl would leave slavery with more in her hand than she would have earned at a servant’s wages in two years. It was a fortune for a young girl. Enough for a dowry in those rural areas of the few satrapies where such things were still customary. The only unusual bit was the instruction that the girl be given an armed guard from the Cloven Shield mercenary company to take her home-Felia Guile had doubtless thought through the fact that sending a very young and attractive girl home with a fortune in hand would put her in grave peril. Of course, sending a guard from the Cloven Shield would cost more than two hundred danars, but they had a sterling reputation.

Like many socially conscious women, Felia Guile had always had deep reservations about slavery. Are we all not brothers and sisters under the light? she would ask. He could almost hear her voice as she talked through it: From Orholam’s perch, what difference is a man’s garment? And like so many others, she’d still had slaves. Impossible to think of a world without them. Men wouldn’t volunteer for the galleys, or the silver mines, or the sewers, would they? And what does one do with the widows and orphans when a country is conquered? Simply let them die at the first winter? Leave them as prey for slavers with less scruples than the civilized satrapies had?

Still, she’d say, it was dehumanizing. The beatings, the fathering of bastards, the jealousies and insecurities of the slaveholders themselves. Felia had never liked it. This manumission was generous, to say the least. But not uncommon to those owners who feared their dear slaves would be passed on to cruel mistresses or depraved masters, or to enemy families who might force them to reveal shameful secrets about their previous owners, or even to good families that might fall on hard times and have to rent their slaves out to work the mines or the brothels.

Gavin tucked away the letter. He looked around the room, wondering if there was anything else he should steal. Money? Gems? Should he try to read his father’s correspondence? He opened the desk and found a box. He examined it briefly, then gave up trying to open that. Andross Guile lived and died by his correspondence. The box would yield to nothing less than a chisel and a smith’s hammer. If that.

With a sigh, Gavin set it back into its place. It had felt heavy, too. In fact, some of the former contents of the box had been emptied out to make more room. Several jewels the size of songbird’s eggs sat carelessly in the drawer among the feather pens and the cunning Ilytian ink-reservoir pen his father liked so much.

Gavin felt a perverse urge to steal something. He was going to get disowned anyway, so he probably ought to do something to earn it.

His eyes fell on the side table with its piles of Nine Kings cards. Apparently his father had been playing recently. It was one of the few things that gave the old man joy. Gavin had played him countless times in the past. The old man almost always won. He was a better player than Gavin, and he wasn’t above cheating either, if he thought he could get away with it, though he’d been mortified the one time Gavin had caught him doing it, and had never cheated again so far as Gavin knew.

Instead of grabbing one of the decks on the table, though, Gavin headed for a cabinet. His father had once pulled an amazing deck out of the cabinet after Gavin had won three games in a row. There was a lock on the cabinet, but it was nothing serious. Gavin rummaged through old papers and his father’s favorite books, and found an old jeweled deck box. He pulled it out, cracked it open. The cards were exquisite, but they didn’t have the blind man’s marks on them. Must have been his father’s favorites from before he went into seclusion.

Gavin dropped the deck box into a pocket and headed back to his mother’s room. The slave girl was standing there, wringing her hands. He handed her the letter and went to his mother’s safe, a chunky Parian design that was hard to tell was arranged into numbers at all. He tried his own birth date. It didn’t open.

Ah. He’d tried Gavin’s birth date. Good: he was sinking back into the disguise.

Dazen’s birth date worked. Thank you, mother. He grabbed some purses of gold, and her wedding ring, and some coin sticks. He gave the slave girl one of them, then a second. Her eyes went wide.

“Take this note to the west docks, the Bakers’ Street, you know it? Blue dome building, houses the mercenary company the Cloven Shield. You ask to speak with One-Eye or Taya Vin. I’d advise One-Eye, he’s kinder to young girls. You tell them Lady Felia Guile sent you. You can pay them up to three hundred danars to get you home, including all their expenses-any less that you can negotiate with them, you get to keep. Then book passage home-where are you from?”

“Wiwurgh, my lord.”

“Paria? You don’t look Parian.”

“First generation, my lord. Parents fled the Blood War. It’s not so bad. Lots of us in Wiwurgh.”

“Very well. It’s a long trip, you should pay forty danars for a stateroom. Cheaper to bunk below, but don’t. Make your guard bunk with you. Man or woman doesn’t matter, the Cloven Shield is safe. You can ask for a woman if you prefer, though. Also, take this note to a tailor. By nightfall tonight, you shouldn’t be wearing a slave’s garb. Understood?” Gavin scribbled a note. “You need to get on a ship tonight, though. This is my mother’s wish, but my father isn’t rational right now. You don’t want to be around when he’s angry, and I’m giving him good cause to be angry. He’ll forget you within a week, but for now…”

He scribbled a second note and signed his own name on it. He dripped red luxin on it, pressed it with his will to make it stand in the shape of his seal, and then sealed it with luxin, barely even looking at it. “This tells anyone who might accost you that the Prism is going to check in on you, and if anything ill has happened to you, I will wreak vengeance on them. It may not be true. I don’t know that I’ll ever get to Wiwurgh, but if I live long enough, I’ll try. You understand?”

The girl’s wide eyes hadn’t contracted in the least, but now she also looked on the verge of tears. “My lord… I don’t know how to thank…” She swallowed.

“Go,” he said. “It’s very dangerous for you here.” And me.

She left, and he followed. Then he went down the tower and hid his father’s deck and Kip’s deck in a spot he was certain his father would never check. He came back up to his own room.

Karris was asleep. Gavin slipped his mother’s huge ruby ring on Karris’s finger. She still didn’t wake. Strangely, the ring fit perfectly. Gavin could have sworn his mother’s fingers were wider than Karris’s delicate digits. He looked at the ring.

His mother had resized it to Karris’s ring size. Gavin smiled. Thank you, mother. He could just imagine her mischievous grin, knowing he would figure it out. He hadn’t gotten all of his smarts from his father, she’d say. Still smiling as tears gathered in his eyes, he kissed Karris’s forehead. He held his wife’s hand and sat with her. His wife’s hand. His wife.

After all they’d been through together. The fights with each other, against wights. The darkness and despair. He tucked a wisp of her hair behind her ear. Touched her face gently. Memorized her. He took a breath, and it was pure.

In a world where every danger was growing and his own strength was failing, Karris had his back. She’d always had his back. And somehow, dying though he was, power fractured, doom looming, he felt more whole than ever.

The yoke of responsibility lay hanging off the bedpost. Gavin kissed his sleeping wife’s forehead, cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and picked the damn thing back up. Slipped it on. It felt good. It felt like it was made for him.

Marissia was waiting at the door. Her face was carefully composed, hands folded, ready to serve. Gavin handed her the note for the tower register to record his mother freeing her slave. Marissia took it silently, but there was a touch of hesitancy in her stance.

“Marissia,” Gavin said quietly. “I… if you’re gone when I get back, I understand, but you will always have a place here.”

She bowed jerkily, and he could tell she was doing it to cover her sudden tears. She practically fled the room. Gavin rubbed the bridge of his nose and stepped into the hallway, doing his best not to look after her. Commander Ironfist was there, waiting silently.

“Commander,” Gavin said. “How do you feel about doing a little skimming? Flirt-with-death dangerous.”

Ironfist said nothing, but his mouth quirked up in a little grin.