The Blinding Knife(54)

Was it a drafting test to see if Kip could—

Moron. It’s a superviolet lantern.

Kip tightened his pupils, and the room jumped into alien, violet, superfine relief. It was a larger room than he’d thought. Portraits of the Guiles’ ancestors hung on every wall. Viewed solely in superviolet light, the portraits were lifeless, monochrome. Kip could distinguish the ridges and bumps from the brushstrokes, but seeing the faces made thereby was more difficult. There was an enormous four-poster bed barely visible through the doors in a second chamber, and of course the heavy velvet curtains everywhere. Ivory and marble sculptures sat on the mantel, on the harpsichord. Kip couldn’t pick a single style from all the art, but it all seemed very, very fine.

There were a number of chairs, divans, and tables. A clock with spinning gears and a swinging pendulum of the kind Kip had only heard of.

Last, Kip looked at the man in front of him, expecting some horror. Despite the darkness, Andross Guile wore enormous dark spectacles. He’d been a big man, before age robbed him. His shoulders were still broad, but skinny. His hair, flat, desaturated violet in the lantern light, must be silvery gray, almost white. It was sparse, disheveled—befitting a man who lived without mirrors. His skin, too, was washed out, loose. Naturally darker than Gavin’s, but bleached by age. His nose straight, deep wrinkles. There was an old scar along his neck up onto his jawline.

He had been a handsome man. Clearly a Guile.

“You play Nine Kings?” Andross Guile asked.

“My mother never had that kind of money,” Kip said. It was a card game. The cards themselves were often worth their weight in gold.

“But you know how to play.”

“I’ve watched others.”

“The deck lies before you,” Andross Guile said. “Let it not be said I’m not fair: the first game will have no stakes.”

“It will not be said,” Kip said. He picked up his deck, and was hit with another reminder of how different of a world he’d stepped into. Depending on the seriousness of the players, there were many different variants of Nine Kings. There were more than seven hundred cards, from which each player constructed his own deck. In villages like Rekton, soldiers passing through might have a deck built by a small-town artist. The main requirement there was that the cards should have no markings on the back side by which players could cheat and draw the card of their choice. Nobles would play with cards made by artists and drafters together at one of the six branches of the Card Guild. Those cards were beautifully drawn and lacquered with blue luxin, guaranteeing every one was uniform.

These weren’t those cards. Each card was electrum—a mixture of gold and silver. Parian cuneiform numbers denoted each strength and ability, and each was adorned with masterful art and signed. Some were inlaid with tiny jewels. All were sealed with perfect crystalline yellow luxin. Jeweled knucklebones and ivory counters and stained glass sand clocks completed the set.

Kip tried to ignore the treasure in his hands and awkwardly shuffled the cards.

“How’d you cripple yourself?” Andross Guile asked. He was expertly shuffling his own cards.

Kip was surprised the old man asked. “I got robbed. I fought, and someone pushed me into a fire. I caught myself with this.” Kip held up his hand, then realized he was holding up his hand to a blind man. “Um, my hand. The wood was still hot.”

“ ‘Still hot’?”

“Oh, I drafted the fire when I fought them.”

Andross Guile mmed that.

They played, and Kip lost spectacularly, barely even recalling the rules. He could hardly decipher the Parian numbers because he’d only just learned them from seeing the Blackguard scrubs stand in order. Andross, on the other hand, played blind. His cards had small bumps and ridges on the face that must have been code to tell him what the card was. It wasn’t cheating, and it wasn’t any advantage, but it told Kip that the makers of the cards were making them specifically with Andross Guile in mind.

No wonder Kip hadn’t done any damage at all to Andross. The man was serious about his game.

The old man was expressionless, though. “Another. This time, there are stakes.”

“What are they?” Kip asked.

“High,” the old man said.

“I don’t have any money,” Kip said.

“I know what you have.”

Kip thought instantly of the dagger. Chose to ignore it. Chose to answer as if it were obvious that he had nothing at all. “Then what are we playing for?”

“You’ll find out when we finish. Play to win.”

Kip took a deep breath and played better the second time, but still got massacred. When his last knucklebone turned over to zero, Andross Guile sat back and folded his hands over his little paunch.