Brent Weeks - The Blinding Knife

The sound of vomiting made Kip and Gunner both turn from their inspection of the blade. Murmurs shot through the crew as Gavin puked water onto the deck.

He rolled over, gasping and coughing.

“Alive? Take him below,” Gunner ordered. “Feed him, tend to his wounds, and bind him. Don’t let him escape. He’s a fighter.” The men lifted Gavin and carried him belowdecks. Captain Gunner shouted again, “Ceres! Ceres! I’m no miser! You share with me, I share with you. I could use this man.” He was talking about Kip, Kip realized. “He’s a drafter. You saw! You know how bad I been wanting a drafter! Good drafter’s hard to find on the sea, Ceres. But you done me right.”

Oh shit.

“I do this, we call it straight between us? Fair? You gave me two. I’ll give you one back!” Gunner said. “Boys?”

Hands descended. Kip tried to fight, but he only got a bloody nose for his trouble. He was so weak there was no resisting. With a heave, the men tossed him back into the sea.

He surfaced in the darkness, hearing only the sweep of oars and the distant sound of Gunner giving orders and laughing.

Kip swam, barely having the energy to keep floating on his back, out of light, unable to draft, certain that someone would come.

No one did.

Koios White Oak the Color Prince came the next morning to the palace in which he’d installed Liv. He seemed jubilant as he beckoned her to join him on the roof.

Together, they looked out over the city. There were some fires in a few neighborhoods. Fighting still continued in pockets. It would be weeks, probably, until the city was pacified. The Color Prince was offering clemency to those rebels who laid down their arms in the next two days. Those who continued fighting would be subject to retributive rapes, the killing of family members, and all the horrors his men could dream up. He didn’t invent war, he said, and he would do anything to end it quickly. Sharp, quick brutality was better, he said, than tolerating protracted lawlessness.

“Did it work?” Liv asked.

“Birthing Atirat?” the prince asked. “Oh yes. You succeeded marvelously. The failure was Atirat’s own-and Zymun’s. We’ll retake the fort on Ruic Head tomorrow and perhaps we’ll learn what happened. It seems he did capture it, but he must have botched something, because they knew he had it. And then he lost it. If he lives, I don’t expect he’ll come back to camp. You’re free of him.”

That was a relief, though Liv felt weak for feeling it. She’d turned the tide of a battle, and she was afraid of a sniveling teenaged boy?

“There’s more good news,” the prince said. “Aside from your tremendous success and us taking the city. Your father wasn’t fighting for them.”

“I know,” Liv said.

“Has he been in communication with you?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?” Koios White Oak asked.

“Because we won.”

The prince laughed, but Liv could tell her answer peeved him. “Let us hope we never have to test your confidence in his abilities, then. But there’s more. Can you feel it?”

He meant magically. “No. I don’t have your senses,” Liv said.

“The Prism is dead. The colors are free.”

“I don’t understand,” Liv said. She felt sick. Her senses had been shut off as soon as Atirat had taken shape. She’d missed the climax of the battle, and she’d hoped that somehow she’d been wrong, that Kip and Karris and Gavin had lived.

“This…” Koios swept a hand toward the bay. “This was a setback. The bane rise spontaneously, Aliviana. All we need to do is wait, and there will be another. Another blue, another green, another one of every color, now.”

She looked over at him sharply. No wonder he wasn’t very upset.

“It will take time, but they can’t stop us now, Liv. The only trick for us is to make sure that as each bane rises, a drafter we trust is at the center of it.”

“A drafter we trust? You mean that any drafter can…” She’d seen Atirat atop the bane, of course, but-Dervani Malargos?

“Any sufficiently talented drafter, yes. In centuries past, it led to bloodbaths, as every green would tear every other apart, each in their quest to become a god. And then the gods would war with each other. But that time is past.” He smiled magnanimously. He opened a hand, and there was a choker in it with an odd, throbbing black jewel at the center. “I told you that I had a purpose in mind for you, Aliviana, a great purpose befitting the greatest of my superviolets. So tell me, can you now guess what it is?”

Andross Guile stood in his cabin, examining himself. He stood, shirtless, with no hood, no cowl, no dark spectacles, the curtains open. He looked at his hands, his arms, and then, last, he looked at his eyes. The broken red halo he’d been hiding for months was gone. He still had all his colors-sub-red, red, orange, and yellow-entwined halfway through the irises of his shocking blue eyes, but they were in balance now.

He’d seen the Blinder’s Knife work before-and it didn’t work like this. That knife killed. But when he looked at his shoulder, it was flawless, not even the skin broken. He looked at his eyes again, certain it was some trick. But there the halo was, stable. And he felt hale. He felt better than he’d felt in fifteen years, twenty. He’d had to sink into his own discipline in order to keep the red from driving him mad-and at the end there, he wasn’t sure he was winning.

Now he was simply a drafter again. A polychrome with a good ten years left in his eyes.

This, this changed everything.

Sometime not long before dawn, Kip washed ashore. He couldn’t take credit for swimming in. He’d barely had the strength to float and breathe for the last few hours. He crawled far enough up the sand not to get pulled out to sea and collapsed like a beached whale.

He woke to someone picking at his pockets, around noon. He floundered, slapping their hands away, afraid he was under attack. He sat up, and saw that there were at least a dozen bodies washed up on the beach around him.

The looter started laughing. Kip blinked up at him, but the young man had the blinding noonday sun burning over his shoulder. He was dressed in a dirty white tunic and cloak adorned with many bands of color. He also had a pistol dangling from his hand.

“Oho, I stopped at the right beach, didn’t I?” the young man said. “Lucky, aren’t I?”

Kip looked down the beach and saw the young man’s dinghy on the beach. He must have seen all the dead from the water and decided to loot what he could. Kip was thirsty. “You have any water?” he croaked.

“In the boat. Food, too.”

Kip stood with difficulty. The young man didn’t help him up. Then it hit him. He knew that voice. He squinted against the brightness. “Oh no,” he said.

“Bit slow, aren’t ya?” Zymun said. He stepped forward and punched Kip in the face.

Kip fell and sat heavily in the sand. He checked his nose, eyes streaming. On the bright side, it wasn’t broken. He stood slowly, walked over to the dinghy. He halfway emptied the skin. He had a headache that he thought was a hangover. He hadn’t had one of those before. Plus he was lightsick. Every part of his body hurt. He had a gash along his ribs and his left arm was throbbing from being stabbed.

Kip considered attacking Zymun, who was rubbing his hand: punching Kip had hurt his fist. But Zymun had a gun. He would see if Kip tried to draft-which right now sounded as appetizing as gargling sewage-and Kip was feeling about as agile as a hundred-and-twelve-year-old man. Kip had seen the boy draft, long ago. He had no doubt that Zymun had the will to use that pistol. He got in the boat.