I stand easily despite the dinghy bobbing like a cork in the waves. I hold my pistol, waving it carelessly as I address the swimming, desperate men who’ve just seen me murder Conner.
“I am Gunner!” I shout, more to Ceres than to the men in the water. “I have done what satraps and Prisms only dream. I am cannoneer of the legendary Aved Barayah! I am sea demon slayer! Shark killer! Pirate! Rogue! And now, I am captain. Captain Gunner is on the look for a crew,” I say, finally turning to the men swimming, scared, surrounded by sharks. I rip my knife free of the gunwale and Conner’s body drops into the hungry sea. “Must be willing to take orders!”
Chapter 11
“I hope you got your rest, little Guile,” a short, thick Blackguard woman named Samite said. She was stationed with him near the back of their column of Blackguards. The galleass had just arrived at Big Jasper this morning, and the Blackguards were the first off. “It’s going to be a long day for you.”
Rest? Kip had been trying to figure out how to conceal his big secret, his inheritance, the last and only gift his mother had ever given him. He had a large, ornate jeweled white dagger that no one knew about, and he had a large, ornate polished dagger box. He could put the dagger in the dagger box, of course, but some paranoid corner of his brain was certain that the first thing a person would ask when they saw the box was if he would open it.
How could he say no?
So late into the night, he’d sat in his little bunk in the darkness, trying not to wake the Blackguards sleeping in the other bunks. He’d found twine and he tied the dagger to his back, a process that took a good ten minutes with his bandaged hand. Its point hung down to his butt, under his clothes, held in place by his belt.
It wasn’t a great solution, but it was the best he could come up with. After his night, a long day was just what he needed now. Still, he mustered a rueful smile for Samite. She was nice, despite her crooked, oft-broken nose and prominently missing front tooth. She was short and solid as a seawall.
They were some of the last to join the column, and once formed up, the Blackguards set off at a slow jog.
Kip thought that he wouldn’t be quite as awestruck the second time he saw the Chromeria. He was wrong. He was still awed even by Big Jasper Island, which was entirely covered by a city. The city was all multicolored domes on top of whitewashed square buildings. Every intersection was adorned with a tower at the top of which hung a mirror, polished and geared so that the mirror could direct sunlight or even moonlight into any part of the city. The Thousand Stars, they called them. The streets were laid out in straight lines with mathematical precision so as to cut off as few beams of light as possible.
Seeing him studying the structures, Samite said, “There is no darkness on Big Jasper, they like to say.” She grinned her gap-toothed grin. “Not literally true, but more true here than anywhere else in the world.”
Kip nodded, saving his air for the jogging. In simply looking over at her for an instant, he almost collided with a black-robed luxiat.
The streets were packed with thousands of people—not for market day or any particular holy day, Kip realized. This was normal for Big Jasper. And the people themselves came from every arc of the Seven Satrapies. Red-haired pale savages from deep within the Blood Forest to woolen-doublet-wearing midnight Ilytians, light-skinned Ruthgari in their wide straw hats to shield them from the sun, Abornean men and women virtually indistinguishable from each other in their layers of silks and earrings.
But regardless of their lineage, the people on the streets had one thing in common: their awe for the Blackguards with whom Kip was jogging. People got out of the way for them, and the Blackguards took it as their due.
At first, Kip tried not to look too conspicuously out of place among all the hard-muscled physiques around him, but soon he was just trying to keep up.
“Don’t worry,” Samite said. Infuriatingly, despite her own body being nearly as wide as it was tall, she wasn’t even breathing hard. “If you can’t keep up, we have orders to carry you.”
Carry me? The mortification of the mental image was enough to keep Kip going. Plus, if they carried him, they’d discover the dagger.
Finally they crossed the Lily’s Stem, the transparent blue-and-yellow-luxin-covered bridge between Little Jasper Island and Big Jasper Island.
Ironfist gave some sort of signal that Kip didn’t see as the Blackguards came into the great yard between the six outer towers of the Chromeria, and the troop disappeared in half a dozen different directions. Kip leaned over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his wind. He flinched, bit back a curse, and took his weight off his left hand.