The Blinding Knife
Page 183

Kip tried to fight the panic clamping down on his chest. It made it hard to breathe. He took a wave at the wrong time and hacked and coughed to clear his lung, almost losing his father’s body. Dear Orholam. Dear Orholam, no.
Gavin Guile was dead. Dead. Dear Orholam, no. Father, why? Why’d you do it?
When he regained some calm, he realized he’d soaked up some light during the fight. He hadn’t even been aware of it. He supposed that like his testing, the fear and anger had dilated his eyes. He’d soaked up luxin without even being conscious of it.
He had a little red and a little yellow. There were other ships out here, he knew it. He just had to let them know he was here. Someone would save him.
After taking a deep breath, he shot sparkling yellow out of his finger. Even that small action pushed him under the waves and left him gasping.
He wondered if there were sharks. He wondered if sharks could smell luxin. He knew they could smell blood, and his father’s blood would be drawing them.
He didn’t panic, though. He didn’t have anything left in him to panic with. After a minute, he held up his hand and drafted red luxin around his finger. With a few tries, he was able to light it with the yellow.
But he couldn’t hold it up and hold his father and swim. He tried to light it again after bobbing in the waves a bit, but too much had washed away.
He heard the ship before he saw it. It came up behind him and blocked out the light behind. A net was thrown over him, and within a minute, he and his father were pulled up, rolled onto the deck.
“What have we? What have we?” A man started cackling. “Ceres!” he shouted. “Ceres, you fickle wench! You beautiful bitch, Gunner loves you! Thank you! Apology accepted! Boys, gather ’round. See what Captain Gunner’s luck has brought us.”
Kip was lying on his back, exhausted. All he had strength to do was breathe.
Gunner? Kip’s thoughts were slow. Gunner was the man on the pirate ship Gavin and Kip and Liv and Ironfist had sunk outside of Garriston, wasn’t he? Gavin had said he hadn’t killed the man because he was an artist. Was this the same man?
Captain Gunner, a night-black Ilytian bare-chested under a waistcoat—a different waistcoat than last time—rolled Gavin over as far as the protruding blade allowed. It was the same Gunner. Oh hell. “Bugger me,” Gunner said, looking at the blade. He tore it out of Gavin’s body and held it aloft.
Kip’s blade was not what it had been. His knife was now a longsword. No, more. The wide blade was three and a half feet long, and whiter than ivory, single-edged with twin black whorls crisscrossing up the blade. Bracketed by those black, twisting, living whorls, every one of those seven jewels now burned with inner light, each one its own color from sub-red to superviolet. The spine of the blade was a thin musket, except for the last hand’s breadth, which was pure blade.
Gunner swung the blade back and forth. “Light,” he said. “Lighter than should be possible.” But when he saw the musket, how the single cutout in the blade was positioned to give space for fingers to steady the barrel, he positively chortled.
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.
Chapter 113
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?”