“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.
Chapter 67
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.
Blue was harder than green. Blue was all Dazen needed to break out of this level of hell.
In another hour, Dazen’s right arm was full. He scooted over to his seat against one wall. He nestled his back firmly against the green luxin and braced himself. For weeks now—months?—he had been shooting out blue projectiles at the highest speed his body could handle, and bracing himself against the wall kept him from being flung about and destroyed.