Skimmer. Condor. Incendiary Musket. Gan Guvair. Helane Troas. Viv Grayskin. Yras the Caster. Iron Elm. Pleiad Poros. The Butcher of Aghbalu. Flashbomb.
Again Kip stopped, went back. The Butcher of Aghbalu. The man was splattered with gore, a fiery scimitar in one hand, stylized blue fire around the other, no armor, just a torn, bloodied tunic, revealing massive ebony arms and shoulders. The bodies of the dead lay all around him, in a palace. The man was young, wearing no ghotra, his kinky hair worn in a braided style Kip had never seen before, but it was undeniably Commander Ironfist. Kip had thought Janus Borig was working on his card, a one-eyed man—and it hadn’t looked like this, but this
was
Commander Ironfist. Younger, but definitely him. Kip’s heart seized.
The
Butcher
?
Kip looked at the weapons rack on the wall. The scimitar from the card was there, at the top. Spine blackened, blade shining. Garnets and scrimshaw, turquoise and abalone.
Part of him wanted to draft and jump into that memory instantly, but he didn’t. He needed to go through all the cards before someone interrupted him. Surely someone was looking for him, surely he couldn’t be allowed to know everything; it was somehow too easy.
He tucked that card away with the others he wanted to examine later and shuffled through the rest quickly. The Butcher of Ru was the next card, the art paired with Ironfist’s card. Kip’s stomach turned. He knew about General Gad Delmarta’s massacre. On that card, the grinning man on the front was swinging a man’s head by its braided Atashian beard in one hand, and a woman’s head by her long black hair in the other. Kip thought about what would happen to his mind if he jumped into that card. If he became General Delmarta, what would he see? What if getting into that mind wasn’t terribly difficult?
This was living history. He could learn things from these cards that no one else knew, that no one else had any way of knowing. And even if Kip wasn’t a real polychrome and couldn’t draft his extra colors consistently, he could
see
them, which meant he could know the whole story of every one of them—as only a few other people in the world possibly could. Whoever controlled these cards would control the truth. This wasn’t just a treasure with a titanic monetary value, it was insight; it was a stripping bare of lies.
Anyone in power would want it for what it could tell them about their enemies. Anyone with a secret would want to destroy it lest their enemies find it.
Anyone with a secret. Like being the Butcher of Aghbalu?
A black cloud demon of smoky despair ripped Kip’s mouth open and crawled into his throat. Commander Ironfist had been the one man Kip thought he could trust. And now Kip was in his room, with treasures, vulnerable.
“It’s not me,” a deep voice said behind Kip.
Kip jumped, so startled he flung priceless cards both left and right.
“My apologies,” Ironfist said. “Thought you might have fallen asleep waiting for me. Didn’t want to wake you.” He knelt to help Kip pick up the scattered cards.
He scowled at the very first one he picked up. Looked over at Kip. “These are… real?”
“Yes, sir.” Kip finally got up and started helping the commander gather up the cards.
They stood, and Commander Ironfist handed Kip a stack of the cards. He kept one in his hand. “I’ve never seen originals before. Does it work? Like they say?”
“Yes, sir. If you draft while you touch it, you experience what they did. The more colors you can draft, the more you see.”
Ironfist looked at the card in his hand. “This card. This is my brother, you know him?”
Kip nodded. Tremblefist.
“When my mother was assassinated—it’s complicated. She’d been keeping me away from the Chromeria, and with her death the reasons for keeping me away died, too. Our father was gone, and we had a
dey
to rule. Both my brother and I were gifted, my sister was too young, so one of us had to stay home to rule. My brother was younger, but I was more gifted, and we had good advisers who would actually do most of the ruling for him. We thought that if I could become a full drafter, in the future I would have more pull with the Chromeria. After I came home, my brother would then take his turn at the Chromeria. So my brother stayed home. To stabilize his rule, we decided he should marry. The Tiru had the best claim, and we should have appeased them. Our advisers told us as much. But we were young men, and though the Tiru’s candidate was not ugly, she was not a beauty to make the heart race either. We were young fools, and I cared what my brother thought. We chose the Tlaglanu princess Tazerwalt because she was prettier than any of the other candidates by far. Her tribe was hated, and though she fell madly in love with Hanishu—pardon, that was my brother’s name, before—even though she loved him and respected him, she was haughty before everyone else. Despised them. It made them hate her more, and made them hate him, too. The competing Tiru had crippled her father during a raid when he was still young, and she was no peacemaker. She took every opportunity to snub and shame them.”
He sighed, but continued, “I had just finished my training when the False Prism’s War began. There was no question that we would support Gavin. Dazen made some abortive overtures to Paria, but we were too deeply indebted to Andross Guile and his father Draccos Guile to take those overtures seriously. You wouldn’t know it from Gavin’s coloring, but no small amount of Parian blood flows in the Guile veins. Anyway, we sent our entire army, and still Andross demanded more. Most of the palace guards went. They ended up barely making it in time, but that’s another story.
“Seeing this weakness, the Tiru tribesmen came from the mountains
and infiltrated the capital city of our dey, Aghbalu, as civilians, and then one day when my brother went out hunting with fifty of the few remaining soldiers with him, the Tiru attacked.
“Hanishu and his fifty were alerted by some refugees, and they came back to the city as fast as they could. The Tiru had already set up camp in the palace, feasting around the still-unburied bodies of those they’d massacred. My brother and his soldiers arrived in the middle of the night. The Tiru were scattered, sleeping, or drunk, and my brother fell on them like a lion. He was eighteen years old, and he already had two daughters and a son. He found his wife’s and children’s bodies. The Tiru had done… unspeakable things to them. My brother went mad. A warrior in his prime and a wild drafter.
“The Tiru panicked, attacked each other, and my brother slaughtered all those he found. They said that he fought like a god, like Anat had possessed him. He killed through the dawn. The people of Aghbalu rallied around him then, and they rounded up the Tiru tribesmen, the old men and the young, the traders and camp followers and the wives and the shepherds… and…” He swallowed. “And Hanishu slaughtered them all. Personally. The Tiru numbered two thousand families, and the Tiru are no more.” He handed Kip the card. “Beware of what memories you choose to watch, Kip. You may carry what you find forever.”
Kip knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t help it. “What if the truth in that card is different than what you were told?”
The big commander turned mournful eyes on Kip. “I don’t think it would matter. I lost most of the people I cared about, and I lost my brother. Hanishu is no more. He was broken by what he did. Still a peerless warrior, but he doesn’t trust himself anymore. He can’t lead. He’s not even a watch captain. Can’t bear the weight of responsibility. Every time I go back into a fight with him, I lose him for weeks afterward.” He ran a hand over his shaven, bare head. “I’m afraid I’ve eaten too much truth recently. So this is what you came to speak to me about?”
“Will you swear not to tell anyone else?” Kip asked.
“You can’t ask me that, Kip. I need to do what I think is right.”
“I’m asking,” Kip said. “If you won’t promise, I can’t tell you everything.”
Commander Ironfist heaved a deep breath. “You’re as bad as any Guile, you know that?”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Commander Ironfist stared at the floor for a while. “I don’t know why you drag us in your wake. Even a child of the Guiles is pulling me along like a leaf in a gale.” He shook his head, and there was bitterness in his sad eyes. “Very well, you have my word.”
“Janus Borig made the cards. I was down at her house—”
“Janus Borig? She’s a myth, Kip. The old Witch of Wind Palace?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kip said. “She’s just an old lady with a little shop.”
“A shop?”
“On Big Jasper.” Kip looked at him, confused.
“You found a True Mirror, hiding in plain sight. You’ve been in this city two months? How’d you find her?”
“The librarian told me—”
“Which librarian?”
“Rea. Rea Siluz.”
“Hmm. I’ll check into that. But never mind that for now. Tell me.”
“I went to Janus Borig’s house tonight. She was murdered. By a man and a woman wearing those cloaks. Shimmercloaks. Made them mostly invisible, except in the sub-red and superviolet.”
For a moment, Ironfist’s face twisted like Kip was a little boy telling the most outlandish lies. Then he looked at the cloaks.
“Show me one of those cards.”
“Which one do you—”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Kip pulled out a card at random and Ironfist drafted a sliver of blue and touched the card for an instant, then snatched back his finger.
“Another,” he said.
Kip extended one, fanning out the cards, but Ironfist chose another. He drafted, touched it, and pulled his finger back as if burned.
“My apologies, I had to know for myself. They’re real. They’re all real. Tell me everything, Kip.”
So Kip did. It was like an enormous burden being lifted from his shoulders. Abruptly, he felt like he was a child again—except it felt good. There were things in the world too big for him to deal with by himself, and trusting Ironfist felt really good. “So what’s it all mean?” he asked.
“I thought war was coming, but I was wrong,” Commander Ironfist said. “War is already here. And you’re in tremendous danger, and so am I.”
It seemed like as much of a global summary statement as Kip had ever heard, and he felt totally inappropriate when he said, “Oh, um. There’s one more thing.”
“Found some other artifact of world-altering power to go with two shimmercloaks and an entire set of original, new Nine Kings cards?” Commander Ironfist asked archly.
Kip’s mouth worked.
“It was a joke, Kip.”
Kip pulled out the dagger slowly and laid it across his palms. It was longer. He was sure of it now. The white seemed whiter, the black whorls seemed blacker. There was also another difference: of the seven diamonds embedded in the blade, one burned bright blue as it had since Kip had recovered it from Zymun, but now a second was lit from within, too. It was a dull green.
Swallowing, Kip looked up at Commander Ironfist.
Dazen Guile was trembling, shivering. His eyes were dry, scratchy from not blinking enough.
He was in a race against his own mortality and a timer with some uncertain amount of sand in it. He’d recovered from his fever, but was still deathly weakened from it. His body, struggling to heal itself from the fever and from the dozens of cuts he’d sustained in crawling through the hellstone tunnel, was desperate and weak. Gavin’s fool lackey kept dropping the blue bread down the tube. The more of it Dazen didn’t eat, the better his source of blue and the faster he could draft. But the more he starved himself, the weaker he became.
And the bread only lasted so long. Once a week—assuming, always assuming that Gavin had arranged for him to be fed once per day, rather than some odd fraction thereof—once a week, the cell was flooded with water.
At first, so many years ago, Dazen had thought this was a mercy.
The water was soapy, warm. He could regain a modicum of cleanliness once a week. If he tried, he could comb the tangles out of his hair and beard. And then he’d tried saving his bread once—and saw the water bleached it, or stained it a dull gray. A blue-gray, it had been in the blue cell, of course, reflecting the blue light of the walls.
It had been a mercy. It had been Gavin’s way of keeping his brother from getting some disease that fed on the muck and filth his own body produced. It had also been Gavin’s way of making sure that whatever Dazen might have hidden away in a week, from his own body’s effluents or from his food, would be washed away, leached of power.
Dazen had needed to swim before he’d broken out of the blue cell, holding the oily cloth he’d woven from his own hair out of the water several times when the torrent had come, and now, in this cell, the bleaching water threatened again. He was too weak to do more than float and save perhaps one blue loaf, so every week he would starve himself for the first couple of days and start drafting again, and his drafting would speed up as the week progressed. Then he would devour all the stale bread his belly could hold before the flood came to wash all away again.
My will is indomitable. Unshakable. Titanic. I cannot be opposed. I cannot be stopped. I will win. There is only winning. And I will crush my brother. This is the fire, this is the fuel, this is the hope that sustains my broken body.