Brent Weeks: The Blinding Knife

“Take off that belt and give it to me. Then tear off a strip of your shirt and tie it around your eyes,” Zymun said. “Slowly.”

Kip did both. He felt Zymun push the dinghy into the water. Kip lunged forward, tearing off his blindfold.

Zymun was clinging to the prow with one hand, bobbing in the water, halfway to climbing into the boat, and he had the pistol leveled at Kip’s face. “Back. Back!” he said. “I can’t hold on here for long, so if you’re not seated and blindfolded in five seconds, I’m going to put a bullet in your face.”

Settling back onto his bench, Kip pulled the blindfold back up, defeated. He’d almost done it. Almost. The cloak of failure draped easily around his slumped shoulders. Kip Almost. Again.

No. That wasn’t true. He wasn’t that Kip anymore. He wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a coward. He wasn’t rejected.

He had gotten into the Blackguard. He had been accepted by the best drafters and fighters in the world. He had been accepted by his father. He had fought a king and wights and a god. He’d made huge mistakes: he’d been stupid and weak and cowardly and rejected. Without him, his father wouldn’t have been stabbed. But he also had pulled his father from the waves, had saved his life when no one else could. Kip had donned Almost as his spectacles. There was a middle path, a golden mean between the whore’s son and the Prism’s. He wasn’t really Kip Godslayer, but he also wasn’t the boy who’d knuckled under to Ramir. Not anymore. I am what I do, and I am Breaker.

He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness. He who has ears, let him hear.

It’s time for me to break that old lens.

“Take the oars,” Zymun said. As Kip reached blindly for them, he heard Zymun slip into the boat. Then he felt luxin encase his hands, locking them around the oars. “You row for an hour, and then I’ll give you food and more water. Go on! We got a long way to go, brother.”

Kip started rowing. His left arm did not appreciate it. “Brother?” he asked. His voice came out calm, unafraid, unashamed.

“My grandfather Andross Guile’s summoned me to the Chromeria. He said the rest of his family hadn’t turned out. Said he’s considering adopting me. Said he has big plans.” He paused. “What, didn’t you know? I’m Karris and Gavin’s son. I’m Zymun White Oak.”

Kip’s heart dropped out of his chest, punched a hole in the deck, and killed a dozen fish on its way to the sea floor.

He heard a metallic scrape of the pistol being examined, and he thought that maybe Zymun had decided to kill him after all. Then Zymun barked a laugh. “Holy fuck am I lucky,” he said to himself. “Would you look at that? This gun wasn’t even loaded.”

Gavin woke to someone slapping his face. He felt awful. The cabin was dark and stank of men who hadn’t washed in ages and bilgewater and seaweed and fish and human waste. There were manacles on his wrists, and he was naked except for a breechclout.

Another slap cracked across his cheek, hard enough to put the taste of blood in his mouth. He opened his eyes. He looked at the man in front of him. His lungs and throat felt raw from the seawater he’d tried to breathe.

“Gunner, you son of a bitch,” Gavin said. His voice was raw, too. Last night was a dim memory. “What are you doing?”

“Can’t draft, can ya?”

Gavin held up his hands, empty, helpless. It was so dim in the cabin it would take him a couple of minutes to draft enough to be a threat to anyone. And summoning the will would be a problem, too, with how terrible he felt.

“Give me a couple minutes,” he said. His left eye was swollen. There was-Oh, Orholam! Gavin checked his chest. It was uninjured. What the hell kind of nightmares had he been having? Thinking he’d been stabbed? Had he been drugged and smuggled off the flagship?

“Your eyes are as blue as Ceres’s, Lord Guile. Not a touch of halo in ’em. Always hated luxlords putting on airs. Ordering people around. Not willing to pull their own weight.” He laughed low, as if he’d said something clever. “But I gots my own solution to the little injustices life brings under my purview. It ain’t quite the ship of state, but she is a stately ship, is she no?”

“This your boat?” Gavin asked, still disoriented. He was seated on a bench next to a skinny man with white hair and beard, big eyes, half clothed. All of the men down here were skinny and half clothed, all drinking water or tearing into hardtack. All wearing chains. All watching him.

“Yes, my boat. The Bitter Cob, I call her, for how she’ll leave your nethers raw. She belongs to me, and now you belongs to her. Serve well, Guile. For if this old girl goes down, you go down with her.”

The other end of his manacles snapped shut around the oar.

“Gunner…” Gavin said, warning.

“ Captain Gunner, Number Six. Or you get a whipping.”

“Orholam damn you, don’t you know who I am?!” It had been almost two decades since Gunner had worked for Gavin. Maybe time had changed him too much for the man to recognize him without his rich clothes.

Gunner grinned. “He who asks, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ is the one who doesn’t know the answer. But here’s the thing, Gavin Guile. I’m going to give you the opportunity to find out.”

“Not Gavin,” Gavin said defiantly. “Dazen. My name is Dazen Guile.”

Gunner threw open the door and daylight poured in. “Whatever guile you use makes no matter to me. You’re Galley Slave Six. Third row, middle seat. But don’t worry, you row strongly and obey alacritously, and you’ll get a head seat in six months. Good to have goals, ain’t it?” He grinned toothily. “Boys?”

Gavin said nothing. He didn’t resist, for in the open door he’d seen something worse than bondage. In the dim near-night of the reeking cabin, he hadn’t noticed: colors were always muted by darkness. But with the opening of that door, with the sky and the birds and sails, and the pure puissant light that Gavin had been waiting to soak up to use to break these chains and escape, he saw something worse. He couldn’t split the colors from that pure white light. He couldn’t split the colors because he couldn’t draft the colors. He couldn’t draft the colors because he couldn’t see the colors. The ignorant speak of subchromacy as color-blindness, when it really is only color confusion.

But Gavin was color-blind. All the world was gray. It was as Gunner had tried to tell him. In one instant, everything that was special about Gavin Guile had been stripped away. He not only wasn’t the Prism anymore, he wasn’t even a drafter. The door to the deck slapped closed, and chains rattled through the handles, trapping Gavin in a blacker darkness than any he had ever known.