The Blinding Knife
Page 79

“Shut up and play,” Kip said.
“Kip the Lip. You never know when to stop, do you? Lean forward, lard boy.”
He obeyed. The blind man groped, found his face, and slapped him heavily.
Kip accepted the blow. There was something purifying in pain. He was a madman. He spat bloody penance on Lord Guile’s floor. Kip the Lip. Ramir had called him that, mocked him.
“Boy, your defiance is inspiring, but be aware that I set the rules, and I have no compunction about changing those when I please. You think you have nothing to lose? Fool. Don’t vaunt until you’ve won, don’t scream defiance until you’ve lost.”
“Well then, I hope you’ll accept my vaunting in about half an hour.”
Andross said, “Let’s get to it, then. Best two of three. Which deck would you like today? I’ll be taking the red.” He gestured. He had white and yellow decks set out for Kip.
“I’ll pass,” Kip said.
Thin eyebrows appeared briefly over the top of Andross Guile’s huge dark spectacles. “Ah, your own deck? Show it to me.”
“They’ve got the blind man’s marks,” Kip said. “Here.” He handed over only one card.
Andross rubbed the corner where the marks were, as if looking for a reason to reject it, but it was perfect work. Janus Borig wouldn’t do less.
Kip half expected the old man to tell him he couldn’t use other cards. It was a rule that had never been addressed.
“If any of the cards don’t have the marks, I’ll reject the entire deck, and you lose, understood?” Andross said.
“Understood.”
“Wondered how long it would be before you finally made your own deck,” Andross said. “Slower than I thought you’d be.”
“Mm-hmm,” Kip said. The insult meant nothing, not in the same breath as the much larger victory of being allowed to use his own deck. “Me first?” Hoping that the old man would contradict him and go first.
Indulgent smile. “Be my guest.”
So Kip set the field of play to outside. Outside made it harder to control the light, which was usually a good call against red. So many of the sources of light indoors were torches or fires—light sources that gave yellow and red and sub-red easily—that it was harder for greens and blues to source their spells.
But Kip going first meant Andross got to draw an extra card.
They established the area quickly, the art on the cards giving them an imaginary space—outside the red walls of a castle. Grass, forest. Blue sky, of course. These were the sources. Either could draft from them, but Kip was on the forest side, so he could draft more quickly from it, powering his green drafting quicker, while the converse was true for Andross and the red walls.
Now that Kip knew the rules, Andross played a fast variant of the game. There were two tiny sand clocks, five seconds each. Absent the visual cues of seeing the grains drain through, the luxlord had a fantastically worked model that rang a bell each time a player ran out of time. If you didn’t play during your five seconds, you lost your turn. As he liked to say, in real life, drafters fought each other simultaneously, each drafting as quickly as they could, deciding on the fly what to do, making mistakes.
Andross Guile’s blindness was the one huge advantage Kip had. He could see his opponent’s card as soon as it was turned over, where Andross had to reach across the table and feel for his. Kip put his new card in the same place every time so that the handicap was as little of one as possible, but it was still at least a second per turn extra that he had. And Andross had to remember everything on the play field.
In the normal variant, turns were taken in a leisurely fashion with no clocks, but Andross despised it, said it taught nothing. Life and death and drafting were fast, he said. The sands of our lives are always pouring out, always too fast.
“Ominous name,” Andross said. The first few moves never took too much concentration.
“What’s that?” Kip asked, trying to decide whether to spend his turn establishing more colors in the field or putting on his spectacles.
“Breaker.”
Spectacles. He didn’t want to be unarmed for any longer than absolutely necessary. “Ominous how?”
“You didn’t put him up to it? Here I was giving you credit for doing that behind the scenes. Clever move, I thought.”
Clever move? Apparently Kip’s silence spoke for him.
“You’d have me believe you getting that name was a coincidence?”
“What’re the two things that are coinciding?” Kip asked.
“Breaker’s one of the epithets the prophecies apply to the Lightbringer.”
“It was a joke. I broke a chair.”
“Funny,” Andross said, tone flat.
“And I broke a boy’s nose. And a bit of drafting someone was doing.”
The Lightbringer? Something in Kip’s soul soared at the very thought. He was distracted by talking and almost missed his turn. He played quickly, putting Damien Savoss on the field and flipping Andross Guile’s clock.
Oh hell. That was one of the forbidden cards. Kip had meant to hold on to those for another couple of turns.
Andross ran his fingers over the marks. Hesitated. Ran his fingers over the marks again. “This is Damien Savoss,” he said. “This card is illegal.” He was one to talk.
“Illegal to possess,” Kip said quickly, “but the justiciars of the game never declared them illegal to play.” He flipped his sand clock over.
“A fine distinction.”
“A fine distinction? I only learned about the black cards because you play with them!”
“Some of the black cards were withdrawn, others were outlawed—” The bell rang, signaling the end of Andross Guile’s turn.
Kip played another card quickly, cementing the luxlord’s missed turn.
Rage washed over Andross Guile’s face. The loose flesh below his jawline quivered. But he said nothing. He played.
In five minutes, Kip won. The additional turn and the surprise of playing against cards he hadn’t seen in more than a decade threw off Andross Guile’s game. Still, it seemed like the man played defensively. Unusual.
“It was a good trick,” Andross said afterward, while they shuffled their decks. “You shouldn’t have wasted it on the girl. That’s the kind of trick that only works once. You should have seen if you could beat me once, and then played that deck for the tiebreaker if you couldn’t. Beyond that, you should have waited until your own future was in jeopardy, not spent it on a slave girl. Foolish.”
Kip turned to Grinwoody. “Some water, please.” He forgot again that you don’t say please to a slave. He was always forgetting that.
But the water wasn’t the point. Kip had figured out that the big spectacles Grinwoody wore somehow allowed him to see in the darkness. With them, Grinwoody was Andross’s eyes. As soon as the old slave turned to grab the pitcher, Kip brought the other deck out of his pocket quietly, speaking to cover the noise of it. “There’s a thousand things you could teach me, Luxlord Guile. You’re brilliant and experienced. But right now you’re my enemy, and you’re trying to inflict horrors on someone who is dear to me. So I’ll keep my own counsel, thanks.”