“She gave me the black cards I used to beat you!”
“You think I’d kill a demiurge over a card game? Where was she? She was here? On the Jaspers?”
“Don’t lie to me! You knew she was here. You’ve had me followed everywhere I go.”
“I have? And every bad thing that happens in the world is my doing? What a simple world you live in,” Andross Guile said. “She was killed? You’re certain of this.”
Kip realized suddenly that he was on the verge of making a tremendous mistake. Anything he said could give Andross Guile information he hadn’t had before. Even coming here did that. “Why should I believe you didn’t kill her?” he said.
“Because she did me two great favors a long time ago,” Andross said. “We were friends, for a time. She had a history of that, you know. Befriending people, using them for her art, and then disappearing. She was doubtless using you, too.”
No, she hadn’t been doing that. Not to Kip. Lies. “What favors?”
“She was making new Nine Kings cards. Did she not—No, of course she wouldn’t have told a child. She made my card first.”
“So?”
“You’ve never seen the true cards, have you? The cards let a drafter live the memories of those they depict—but only up to the moment when the cards were drawn. Janus Borig enshrined me as important enough to deserve a card, and did it without threatening me. At best, an enemy could learn my thoughts and plans as of what, twenty-eight years ago? I am the only important person alive to whom those new cards are not a threat.”
Which meant he would want Janus Borig to finish as many of her other cards as possible. Of course he would do anything to get his hands on the final product, but he wouldn’t kill her before she finished.
“And the second favor she did you?” Kip asked. He was deflating, though, defeated already.
“You tell me what happened, and I’ll tell you.”
Kip slumped, and Grinwoody released him. “I went to her home tonight—”
“Where?”
“On Big Jasper.”
“Where?”
Kip told him. “When I got there, the house was on fire. The whole neighborhood was trying to put it out before it spread. They thought it was a lightning strike, but they found her a couple streets over, with no cloak, and stab wounds all over her. I could barely even recognize her.” If Kip had gotten there late, even if Janus Borig had taken something out of the house, there was no way to tell who might have found her first, who might have stolen what she had.
“Did you see anyone suspicious?” Andross asked.
“You know what?” Kip said. “Forget it. I’m not trading with you. You’re better at this game. I don’t need to play.”
Kip drafted a superviolet torch and saw that Samite was standing behind Grinwoody, the point of a knife a finger’s breadth from the back of his neck. In the utter darkness. She was that good.
“She gave me my card, Kip,” Andross Guile said. “So I could see exactly what was in it. She could make copies, of course, but they’re always weaker. She feared me. I know that. But I had no reason to hurt her.”
And Andross Guile never did anything without a reason.
Chapter 65
~Skirting the Issue~
Tap. Superviolet-blue. Tap. Green. Tap. Yellow. Tap. Red, sub-red.
The young Blackguard steps back from the precipice. The smell of burning homes, burning livestock, and burning human flesh wafts up from the valley floor.
“I can make the jump, Commander,” he says. Skinny, long-legged, hair perpetually askew, Finer is the young man I hope will succeed me as commander one day. If this kind of mission doesn’t kill him. The boy says, “It’ll take us twenty minutes if we go down the trail.”
Normally so decisive, I hesitate.
“It’s not incarnitive, sir.”
“It’s real damn close.”
“Yes, sir.”
What Finer has discovered is that if he stabs points of green luxin from the braces into his knees, it allows him to keep the luxin open, fluid. This itself is no great discovery, of course. As long as luxin is touching blood, it can be held open. But external, attached luxin with direct control? That’s perilously close to what wights do.
With the seals held directly at his knees, Finer can run with the braces on and have them not encumber his motion, but when he falls, he can close the weave. The stiff springiness of the green luxin will keep him from destroying his knees. It also seems that with the luxin inserted at his knees it reacts faster, instinctively opening or closing for what the body knows it needs.
This is exactly what leads otherwise good men and women to become wights: the realization that luxin is better than flesh. At certain things. But the more you experiment with it, the greater a hold it gets on you. There’s always a good reason to use more.
And yet.
Orholam hates war, and yet he allows war in certain exigencies. So.
“Do it,” I breathe.
Finer pulls up the leg of his trousers and begins drafting green. He drafts braces of green luxin around his knees, stabs the points in, drafts a thick sheen around his thighs. Then more.
Orholam’s balls, he’s coating his entire body. Going green golem.
“Son,” I say, “you let it go once you get down.”
Finer turns to me and grins a wild grin. “Yes…” he struggles, “… sir.” He grins again, gives a jaunty salute, and leaps off the precipice.
The glorious sonuvabitch. He does a somersault on the way down.
Chapter 66
Back safely in Ironfist’s room, Kip studied the card box. It hadn’t been moved, of course. And Ironfist still wasn’t back. The box, the only thing that was left of Janus Borig’s life’s work, was made of olivewood and lacquered ivory inlaid with electrum. Kip rubbed his hands on his shirt to get as much of the oils off them as possible, then cracked open the box.
The cards slid into his hand. Originals. He could see the tiny brushstrokes on them; the paint had a thickness to it, rising from the surface of the cards where details had been meticulously applied. But they weren’t just originals. The names on the cards were names—both people and game mechanic cards—that Kip knew had never been in the game before: Talon Gim, Deedee Falling Leaf, Izem Red, Orea Pullawr, The Prisoner, New Green Wight, Polychrome Wight, Orlov Kunar, Jing, Black Powder Charge, Luxin Grenadoes, Sea Demon Slayer, Flintlock, Shimmercloak, Heresy, Three-Eyed Ben, Usem the Wild, Ganesh the Bear—Kip stopped.
Shimmercloak? Orholam’s balls. The painting depicted a sneering man with heavy brows: it was Vox. His gray cloak was visible at the neck where the chains bit into his throat, and then his body disappeared below that. The text read, “If Lightsplitter, grants invisibility except against sub-red and superviolet.”
If Lightsplitter?
Kip stared at the two cloaks drying by the fire. The cards were real. They were of real things, and they told the truth. They were new cards—and they were of people who had been alive recently. Kip knew some of those names had been drafters whom he’d seen at Garriston.
And if the cards were of those who had recently been alive, it was possible that there were cards of those who were still alive.
Kip began flipping through the cards faster, not trying to grab all the details, not trying to savor the art—he was hunting.