The Blinding Knife: Lightbringer: Book 2 Read online

  “Hmm, a superchromat boy. It’s been years,” Magister Hena said. “Very well. Up front.”

  She separated the rest of the class, and then went back up front herself to address those who had passed. “Very well. Girls… and boy… you’ve been moved up front because you’re favored by Orholam. You can appreciate the beauties of Orholam’s creation in ways the rest of this class and most of the world is blind to. However, that means more will be expected of you. That is why I’ve had you come to the front, not because I care what accident of birth gave you better eyes than the rest. You do have better eyes than the rest, so you have a responsibility to Orholam and to me to use those eyes well. Understood?”

  “Yes, Magister,” the girls said weakly.

  She raised her eyebrows and peered at them over her goggly lenses. They repeated it, louder. Kip joined them, lest he be even more different.

  “Good. Now, the abacus. Any of you here from Tyrea?”

  “No? Oh, the boy, of course,” she said as Kip raised his hand. She went on, “Tyrea was, despite all evidence to the contrary, once the seat of a great empire, long before Lucidonius came. Perhaps it was crumbling by the time he did come, or perhaps he hastened its demise. That is for another class. The Tyrean Empire gave us a few gifts and a few curses. The only one I care about for this class’s purposes is the base twelve number system. Tyrea is the reason our day is broken into twelve-hour halves, and sixty-minute hours. Some of you Aborneans and Tyreans may have been taught to use the base twelve system in counting and in arithmetic. If so, this class will be much, much harder for you. That number system is unholy, and you will not use it henceforth. Unholy? you ask. Yes, blasphemous. How can a number system be unholy? Well, how can a number system be based on twelves? What is our number system based on, anyone?”

  “Ten,” a girl in the front row said.

  “Correct. Why does ten make sense?”

  No one answered. “Fingers,” Kip said, being a wiseass.

  “You think you’re joking, but even fools can be right.”

  Kip scowled.

  “It’s true. Fingers and toes. So if fingers and toes are the easiest way for primitives and morons to count”—she glanced at Kip—“especially before parchment or vellum or paper, how does a society count based on twelves?”

  Kip scowled harder.

  A girl at the back raised her hand. Magister Hena called on her. “The Tyrean gods had six fingers and toes.”

  “Exactly. That’s why you’ll hear stories of children who have six fingers and toes being venerated in certain superstitious corners of the world. You’ve heard of such things, right, boy?”

  “It’s Kip, and no, I’ve never heard of any such thing.”

  “Well, then perhaps your parents were particularly enlightened for Tyrea. Or ignorant even of the ignorance, I suppose.”

  Kip opened his mouth, then shut it. Don’t, Kip. It doesn’t matter. He suddenly felt hungry.

  The next hour was spent learning how to use an abacus. The four beads on the bottom row were called the earthly beads, and the one bead on the top row was the heavenly bead. And first they simply counted, up and down, adding by ones, subtracting by ones. Then adding by twos and subtracting by twos, then fives.

  Some of the students clearly were bored, having learned this long ago. Others, like Kip, struggled to keep up with even basic arithmetic. But the children who did the worst were the few who had learned to use the abacus on the base twelve system. They seemed frozen; everything they’d learned was wrong.

  The next lecture was better. It was Properties of Luxin, taught by a ferret-faced Ilytian magister who leaned on his cane in between making points. Kip was surprised to find that half of the auditors were non-drafters. And the non-drafters were all smart and driven. These were the future architects and builders of the Seven Satrapies. Like the drafters, these boys and girls had their tuitions paid for by the satraps. Some were connected—second and third sons of nobles who had to be given some way to support themselves. But even they had passed competency tests in order to be accepted.

  Kip could tell right away that these children wouldn’t need any training on the abacus.

  The tutorials were pretty basic today, though. Sheets of blue luxin one foot by one foot and one thumb thick were placed on supports, then weights added to the center until they shattered. The same was done with green, and superchromat-drafted yellow.

  Magister Atagamo then had those students who were able to do so draft their own sheets of blue luxin. He tested each of those. They all failed at much lower weights—especially the boys’. “Later, I will have you memorize the theoretical weakest blue luxin that will still hold a solid so that you know the full range. For now, be aware that we are establishing maximum strengths. The luxins we have to work with are superchromat-drafted. Your own luxin will be weaker than this. Boys, yours will usually be substantially so.”

  Then Magister Atagamo’s assistants put a cubit tub on a scale, showed how it measured one foot per side, zeroed the scale, and filled it with water. Kip noticed that all of the other students were writing everything down.

  The weight of the water within that small tub was a seven, the basic unit of measuring weight. Of course, that was too big of a weight to be useful for a lot of things, so it was broken into sevs: one-seventh fractions of a seven. Kip weighed twenty-nine sevs, or four sevens and one sev, usually expressed as four sevens one.

  But the magisters weren’t finished. They poured out the water and had three superviolet drafters fill the tub with superviolet luxin. That was when Kip knew he was in real trouble—they were measuring everything! When they unsealed the superviolet and it dissolved into feather-fine, nearly invisible dust, they swept that out into a tiny cup and measured it. Everything that could be quantified was.

  For a while, with the rest of the students, Kip simply wrote down the numbers without knowing why. Then they asked them to add the weights of all the colors together. The students who were already proficient with their abacuses did so quickly. Kip barely got through adding the first two before those students were finished.

  Magister Atagamo said, “Now, subtract the weight of the cube of green luxin from that total, and add the weight of a small woman, let’s say eleven sevs.”

  Four girls—non-drafters all—had the total practically as soon as the magister was finished talking. Kip was aghast.

  “Excellent,” the magister said. “Now, a practical example. You’re a blue drafter, manning the counterweights for the lift in one of the towers. One of the counterweights breaks in half. It is made of iron, and weighs thirty sevs six. How much blue luxin will you have to draft to replace the counterweight? If your counterweight is more than three sevens heavier than the original when combined with the weight of the delegation, the pulley will break, killing everyone. When you have your answer, come show it to me. For the sake of our example, we’ll pretend that the delegation is coming from your home satrapy, and if you don’t have the lift ready by the time they arrive, you will shame them and lose your sponsorship. So you have thirty minutes to get your solution. If you get the answer quickly, you can leave, take the rest of the morning off. If you can’t, there will be a mark against you for today. Go.”

  The other students set to work immediately, and Kip saw that the easy answer was impossible. He couldn’t just add full-size blocks of blue luxin together, because that would make the counterweight too heavy. The arithmetic here was to find the exact fractional volume of blue luxin he would need to make a new counterweight.

  The best girls and boys were already working their abacus beads back and forth. Kip wasn’t good enough with the abacus. He’d never make it in time. He didn’t know how to figure fractions. He could work the entire time and still not—Oh.

  Got nothing to lose, do you, tubby?

  Kip scribbled something on his paper, stood up, and walked to the magister’s desk.

  The magister looked at him tolerantly, like he was a student who had
n’t understood the question and was about to ask for clarification. Kip held up the paper.

  He’d drawn a quick sleeve of blue luxin to go around the original counterweight to hold the broken halves together.

  “You’re Guile’s by-blow, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Magister.”

  “I can tell. Those boys cheated magnificently, too.”

  Kip swallowed. The rest of the class stopped working on hearing “cheated.” “You taught them, sir?”

  Magister Atagamo’s mouth twisted. He ignored the question. “You’ll have to learn to use the abacus eventually, you know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The old man snorted. “Goodbye, little Guile.”

  “So I pass?”

  “Highest marks of the day. And don’t ever do it again.”

  Chapter 23

  “Give us privacy,” the White said.

  Ironfist stood in the White’s chambers, atop the Prism’s Tower at the center of the Chromeria. The wheels of her chair were tall enough that she could push on them directly to move around her room, which she insisted on doing, despite the delicacy of her wrists.

  “My blanket, please,” she said.

  He brought over her blanket—something she’d woven decades ago with her own hands. Like many who make their livelihood with their minds, she had an outsized pride in the few things her hands had crafted. It was perhaps the only thing for which Ironfist could consider her a silly old lady. He tucked the blanket around her legs and was surprised to feel how thin those limbs had become.

  “You see?” she said. “You can tell, can’t you, Commander?”

  Silly old lady indeed. She’d set him up. Sharper than he was, still. It was a good reminder, both ways. Weak physically, but not mentally. Not in the least.

  “Tell what, my lady?”

  “Psh,” she said. A little eye roll. “It is a hard place, for those who are not prepared.” I’m dying, she was saying, prepare yourself so that when I do you won’t fall prey to your enemies.

  It was both terrifying to imagine a world without Orea Pullawr as the White, and warming to learn that she considered him a friend.

  “Tell me again, Commander, about your coming to Garriston, and the preparations for battle there.”

  So he did, again. He tried to tell it differently, knowing that she was sifting his words, looking for something. He told her about the movement of troops, about how many men and drafters each side had, about the disposition of the Ruthgari garrison that had been there. She’d been interested in that, the first time. But now those were mere numbers to her. She already had memorized them, and analyzed what they meant about the Ruthgari commitment to Tyrea, and who had been bribed. Now she was looking for something else.

  He spoke for two hours. He told her about General Danavis coming alone—unmustached—to the Travertine Palace, and how Ironfist had been expelled from the meeting. He spoke of Gavin moving the wagon that had blocked the gates, making the men help in doing what he could have done by himself, thereby somehow cementing them to his own cause.

  She smiled at that, a small, knowing smile. Perhaps the smile of one leader approving of another’s nice play.

  He wasn’t sure what she was looking for, though, and pretty certain that he wasn’t supposed to know.

  “You don’t gamble, do you, Commander?” she asked.

  “No, my lady.” How did she know that? He supposed it wasn’t the kind of thing that would be hard to find out, but that she had, that she cared about it, and that she recalled it was what made the White both alien and a little frightening.

  “Always thought that was strange. You seem like the kind who would.”

  “I used to,” Ironfist admitted. “I had a bad experience.” He kept his face even. Equanimity was all a man could aspire to. Knowing what you had control over, and what you didn’t. The Nuqaba had no place in his thoughts.

  “My husband used to play Nine Kings. He maintained that he was a mediocre player, though he rarely walked away from a table with much less than he brought to it. He had a reputation as an amiable player who served fine liquor and excellent tobacco, though, so he played with all sorts of men from all over the Seven Satrapies. We were married three years—and I was only beginning to really fall in love with him—before he got me to come to one of his parties. It wasn’t the night he would have chosen for me to see.

  “A young lord came. Varigari family. From a line of fishermen before they were raised in the Blood Wars. He came in, new and cocksure, and over the course of the night he went through a small fortune. The lords my husband played with that night were wealthy, and decent men, not wolves. They could see what was happening. They told the young Varigari to quit. He refused. He won often enough that he kept hope, and I could see the resignation on their faces: he loses a small fortune, and perhaps it teaches him a lesson, so be it. Dawn came, and he had nothing, and there was this moment where he bet a small castle in order to stay in. I saw this look on his face. It’s etched into my memory. Do you know what he was feeling?”

  Ironfist could feel it right now, the memory was so hot and sharp. “Terror, but elation, too. There’s something potent in knowing that you have pushed your life to one of its pivots. It is insanity.”

  “I glanced at my husband, unable to believe what I was seeing. Everyone else was looking at the young Varigari. My husband was looking at everyone else. And I realized a few things all at once.” She coughed into her handkerchief, then glanced at it. “Keep worrying I’m going to cough blood one of these times. Not yet, thank Orholam.”

  She smiled to defuse his worries, and continued, “First, about the young man: the small fortune he’d lost was not a small fortune to him, and the small castle he’d bet was probably the last thing his family owned. To him this wasn’t a lesson; this was ruin. Second, my husband was no mediocre player. He had the winning hand, and he had the wealth to risk playing it. He was an expert, but an expert who took pains to rarely win, because he’d found something that was more valuable to him than winning small fortunes and becoming known as a great player of Nine Kings. What he was really doing every time he played was taking the measure of those he played with. Finding not just their tells, but how they reacted to the whims of fate and fortune. Was this satrap greedy? Did this Color get so focused on one opponent that she ignored a true threat? Was this one smarter than anyone knew?”

  Scary to think of the White paired up with a man as smart as she was.

  She said no more.

  “And?” Ironfist asked.

  “And?” she asked.

  “There was a lesson in there somewhere,” Ironfist said.

  “Was there?” she said, but her eyes danced. “I’m so old.”

  “I know you too well to think your mind is just wandering.”

  She smiled. “When the big bets are on the table, Commander, it’s good to know which character in that little drama you are.”

  Problem with being surrounded by brilliant people: they expect your mind to be as nimble as theirs. Ironfist had no idea what she was talking about. He’d get there eventually, he always did, but he’d have to mull it over for a while. “If I may, my lady?”

  “Please.”

  “Did Lord Rathcore ever play against Luxlord Andross Guile?”

  She chuckled. “I guess it depends what you mean. Nine Kings? Never. He knew better. You don’t play against those to whom you can only lose. I’ve seen Andross play. He uses his stacks of gold like a bludgeon. There is no gracefully losing a little bit of gold to Andross. It’s win big or lose bigger against him. For my husband to play Andross was to lose a fortune or to lose the whole purpose of his games by exposing how skilled he was.”

  “And if I wasn’t asking about Nine Kings?” Ironfist asked. He had been, but she obviously meant to tell him more.

  She smiled, and he was glad that he served her. To be the commander of the Blackguard was to stand ready to give your life for those you protected, regardless of
your feelings. But for this woman, even frail and with few days left, Ironfist would gladly trade his life. She said, “All I’ll say is this: Andross Guile isn’t the White, and it galls him deeply.”

  But the White was chosen by lot. Orholam himself moved his will through that.

  But if Andross Guile had thought being the White was a victory within his grasp, maybe that was because it actually had been. Surely to corrupt the election of a White was the work of a heretic—worse, an atheist. Ironfist couldn’t comprehend it.

  The further implication—that Lord Rathcore had stymied Andross Guile by instead getting his wife Orea selected—was almost worse. If the White’s election had been tainted by the machinations of men, was it thereby void? How could Orholam tolerate such a thing?

  And yet the White was a holy woman, a good woman. Perhaps she hadn’t been involved, or hadn’t known, or hadn’t figured it out until many years later. And then what would you do? Abdicate because there was some blight on your election that no one else had ever noticed and that even you hadn’t known about? Perhaps that would bring greater disrepute on the Chromeria than simply to let it lie.

  But it shook Ironfist’s faith. What had Gavin said on the ship? Some jest about being chosen by Orholam—a jest that only made sense as a jest if you didn’t believe Orholam really did choose.

  Lord Rathcore had blocked Luxlord Guile from becoming the White, but couldn’t block him from having his son made the Prism.

  It almost took Ironfist’s breath away to think of it in such nakedly political terms. He was no naïf. He served these people. He knew that even the greatest had their foibles. He knew they all had vast ambition. But surely, surely some few things must be held holy.

  He remembered again holding his mother’s bleeding body, screaming his prayers to Orholam, praying until he thought heart and soul would burst. Praying that Orholam would see him, just for one moment of his life. Hear him, just once. And his mother died.

  “Who won? That night. What happened?” he asked.